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RUPERT BROOKE 

A MEMOIR 



The 

COLLECTED POEMS 

of 

RUPERT BROOKE 

WITH A 

PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT 
0/ the AUTHOR 



Cloth, $1.25 net 



Leather, $2.00 net 



"It is packed with the stuff of which poetry 
is made: vivid imagination, the phrase that 
leaps to life, youth, music, and the ecstasy 
born of their joy when genius keeps them com- 
pany." — The Outlook. 



JOHN LANE COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



RUPERT BROOKE 

A MEMOIR 



BY 

EDWARD MARSH 



NEW YORK 
JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMXVIII 



■\ 



Copyright, 1918, 
By John Lane Company 



SEP' 23 1918 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



* 



! -503518 



INTRODUCTION 

I feel that an apology is due to those who have 
been looking for some time for a Memoir of my 
son. The chief reason for the delay has been 
my great desire to gain the collaboration of some 
of his contemporaries at Cambridge and during 
his young manhood, for I believe strongly that 
they knew the largest part of him. Up to now 
it has been found impossible to do this, much as 
I should have wished it; and as since his death 
many of them have also laid down their lives, 
there is no longer any hope of doing so in the 
future. I have therefore consented to the Me- 
moir coming out now, although it is of necessity 
incomplete. I cannot speak strongly enough of 
the ability and loving care that Mr. Marsh has 
given to the work. 

M. R. B. 
April 1918 



NOTE 

This Memoir was written in August, 1915, a 
few months after Rupert Brooke's death, and 
my intention was to publish it with his collected 
jpoems in the course of that year. Circumstances 
prevented this, and now that three years have 
passed I ought probably to rewrite it in the 
changed perspective and on a different scale. As 
this is impossible for several reasons, I have had 
to be contented with a general revision, and the 
addition of letters which have since come into 
my hands. 

I am very grateful to his Mother and to those 
of his friends who have allowed me to quote from 
his letters and from their accounts of him. 

E. M. 

April, 1918. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Memoir 11 

Appendix 187 

"I Strayed About the Deck, an Hour, To- 
night" 189 

The Dance 190 

Song 190 

"Sometimes Even Now ..." 191 

Sonnet: In Time of Revolt 192 

A Letter to a Live Poet 192 

Fragment on Painters 194 

The True Beatitude 195 

Sonnet Reversed 195 

The Little Dog's Day 196 



RUPERT BROOKE 

A MEMOIR 



RUPERT BROOKE 

A MEMOIR 



Rupert Brooke was born at Rugby on August 
3rd, 1887. His father was William Parker 
Brooke, a Rugby master, son of Canon Brooke 
of Bath; and his mother was Mary Ruth Cot- 
terill. He was the second of three brothers. 1 

When he was five years old his father became 
Housemaster of School Field, which was his 
home till 1910. He loved the house and the gar- 
den, especially his own particular long grass- 
path with borders and pergolas, where he used 
to walk up and down reading. At this House 
he entered Rugby in 1901, from the preparatory 
school at Hillbrow, and next year won a scholar-* 
ship. 

His school life was very happy. In his first 

1 Dick, who was six years older, died in 1907; and Alfred, three 
years younger, was killed near Vermelles in June, 1915, serving as 
a lieutenant in the Post Office Rifles. 

11 



12 RUPERT BROOKE 

year at Cambridge, reading out a paper on Mod- 
ern Poetry which he had written at the end of his 
last term at Rugby for the School Society called 
"Epavos, and afraid that the alarming under- 
graduates might think it sentimental, he excused 
himself by explaining the circumstances in which 
he wrote it. "I had been happier at Rugby," 
he said, "than I can find words to say. As I 
looked back at five years, I seemed to see almost 
every hour golden and radiant, and always in- 
creasing in beauty as I grew more conscious; 
and I could not (and cannot) hope for or even 
quite imagine such happiness elsewhere. And 
then I found the last days of all this slipping 
by me, and with them the faces and places and 
life I loved, and I without power to stay them. 
I became for the first time conscious of tran- 
sience, and parting, and a great many other 
things." 

This happiness was compounded from many 
sources: friendship, games (he played for the 
School in both the XI and the XV) , and books. 
He was a balanced combination of the athletic 
and the intellectual types of schoolboy — 'always 
with a ball in his hand and a book in his pocket' 
is a vivid little description. "Rupert" (writes 
a contemporary in the Vlth who was at another 
house, and afterwards became an Assistant Mas- 



A MEMOIR 13 

ter 1 ), "first of all people at school gave me an 
inkling of what a full life really meant. I was 
an awful Philistine, and still am, I fear; but he, 
with no appearance of superiority or attempt at 
preaching, as keen as any of us on all the im- 
mensely important events in school life, and al- 
ways ready for a rag, impressed us as no one else 
could with the fact that these things were not all 
— not even the most important. And the best 
thing about him was that he was not out to im- 
press us — it was just being himself." 

His great school- friend Hugh Russell- Smith, 
since killed in action, wrote in the Rugby paper, 
the 'Meteor,' when he died: — 

"For the first two or three years, I think, few 
of us realised that someone out of the ordinary 
had come among us. He was rather shy and 
quiet, though he at once proved himself a good 
athlete, and he lived much the same life as any- 
one else. Gradually, however, we began to no- 
tice little things about him. Instead of coming 
'down town' with us, he used to go off to the 
Temple Library to read the reviews of books in 
the 'Morning Post' and 'Chronicle.' He read 
Walter Pater, and authors we knew very little 
about. He read a good deal of poetry, and he 

1 Hubert Podmore, who, before he was killed in action, gave 
Mrs. Brooke leave to publish this extract from his letter to her. 



14 RUPERT BROOKE 

let us find him in raptures over Swinburne. He 
began to wear his hair rather longer than other 
people. Still, he played games enthusiastically, 
and helped us to become Cock House in football 
and in cricket. Gradually most of us in the 
House came under his spell. We accepted his 
literary interests. He was so straightforward 
and unaffected and natural about them, and he 
took our chaff so well, that we couldn't have 
helped doing so. Perhaps they amused most of 
us, but one or two — and those the most unlikely 
— were occasionally found clumsily trying to see 
what there really was in such things. But it was 
his personal charm that attracted us most, his 
very simple and lovable nature. Few could re- 
sist it. When in his last year he became head 
of the House, almost everyone came under the 
sway of his personality. It seems to me now, as 
it seemed then, that there really was a spirit in 
School Field which made it rather different from 
any other House. It was due, I believe, partly 
to Rupert, partly to his father. The situation 
might have been difficult for both. The way in 
which things actually turned out shows one of 
the most delightful sides of Rupert. He was in 
all things more than loyal to his father, but he 
never made it awkward for the rest of us. His 
sense of fun saw him through, and it helped us 



A MEMOIR 15 

a good deal to know that he would not misin- 
terpret all the little pleasantries that boys make 
at the expense of their Housemaster. The re- 
sult was a sort of union between the Housemas- 
ter and the House, which made very much for 
good. 

"Outside the House, his worth was realised to 
the full by some — by the Upper Bench, and by 
a few of the Masters who knew and loved him. 
He rose to a high place in the Vlth, won two 
prizes for his poems, played cricket and football 
for the School, and became a Cadet Officer in 
the Corps. But I think he was never a school 
hero. It was chiefly his House that knew his 
lovableness. And when he was at Cambridge, 
I think he always loved the House lunches, which 
we used to have nearly every week. The last let- 
ter I had from him was one in which he was talk- 
ing of members of the House who had fallen in 
the war. 

"Rupert had an extraordinary vitality at 
school, which showed itself in a glorious enthu- 
siasm and an almost boisterous sense of fun — 
qualities that are only too rare in combination. 
Of his enthusiasm it is hard to speak; we knew 
less about it, although we felt it. We knew much 
more of his glorious fooling — in his letters, in his 
inimitable and always kind burlesques of mas- 



16 RUPERT BROOKE 

ters or boys, in his parodies of himself. He 
seemed almost always ready for laughter. It is 
often the small things that stand out most vividly 
in one's mind. I see Rupert singing at the very 
top of his voice, with a magnificent disregard for 
tune, the evening hymn we used to have so often 
at Bigside Prayers. I see him rushing on to the 
Close to release a sheep that had become entan- 
gled in one of the nets. I see him tearing across 
the grass so as not to be late for Chapel. I gen- 
erally think of him with a book. He had not yet 
developed that love of the country and that pas- 
sion for swimming with which the friends of his 
Grantchester days associate him. He used to 
read, when we used to walk or bathe. But what- 
ever he was doing or wherever he was, he was 
always the same incomparable friend. He has 
often quoted to me a verse of Hilaire Belloc: 

From quiet homes and first beginning, 

Out to the undiscovered ends, 
There's nothing worth the wear of winning, 

But laughter and the love of friends. 



< 



How much Rupert loved Rugby while he was 
there, I know; and I know too how much those 
who knew him there loved him." 

The letters which he wrote in his last year at 
school are radiant. "I am enjoying everything 



A MEMOIR 17 

immensely at present. To be among 500 people, 
all young and laughing, is intensely delightful 
and interesting. . . .* I am seated on the top- 
most pinnacle of the Temple of Joy. Wonder- 
ful things are happening all around me. Some 
day when all the characters are dead — they are 
sure to die young — I shall put it all in a book. 
I am in the midst of a beautiful comedy — with 
a sense of latent tears — and the dramatic situa- 
tions work out delightfully. The rest are only 
actors; I am actor and spectator as well, and I 
delight in contriving effective exits. The world 
is of gold and ivory. . . . How is London? 
Here the slushy roads, grey skies, and epidemic 
mumps cannot conceal a wonderful beauty in the 
air which makes New Big School almost bear- 
able." And in the summer: "I am infinitely 
happy. I am writing nothing. I am content to 
live. After this term is over, the world awaits. 
But I do not now care what will come then. 
Only, my present happiness is so great that I 
fear the jealous gods will requite me afterwards 
with some terrible punishment, death perhaps 
—or life." 

'Work' was only one of the lesser elements 
which went to make up all this joy. He got a 

1 Throughout this book, three dots mean that there are dots in 
the original letters; six, that something is omitted. 



18 RUPERT BROOKE 

fair number of prizes, and went to King's with a 
scholarship : but lessons seem to have been almost 
the only thing he didn't as a rule care for. He 
would have liked to read the books as books, but 
grammar irked him. When he came to 'extra 
work' for the scholarship examination, he en- 
joyed it. "This introduces me to many authors 
whom the usual course neglects as 'unclassical.' 
. . . Theocritus almost compensates me for all 
the interminable dullness of Demosthenes and 
the grammars on other days. I never read him 
before. I am wildly, madly enchanted by him." 
He never became an accurate scholar, and though 
he enjoyed certain authors, and had a special love 
for Plato, I don't think Greek and Latin played 
the part in his development which might have 
been expected. 

His voluntary reading, at school and after- 
wards, was mainly English — quantities of prose, 
but still more poetry, in which his taste was very 
comprehensive; and his zealous interest in con- 
temporary work had already begun. A paper 
on Modern Poetry, which he read to the'Epavos 
Society, presses on his hearers Kipling, Heniey, 
Watson, Yeats, A. E., and Ernest Dow- 
son. This brings us to his amusing phase of 
'decadence.' From 1905 till well into his second 
year at Cambridge he entertained a culte (in 



A MEMOIR 19 

such intensity, somewhat belated) for the litera- 
ture that is now called 'ninetyish' — Pater, 1 
Wilde, and Dowson. This was a genuine en- 
thusiasm, as anyone may see from his earliest 
published work, especially the poems written in 
the alexandrine of 'Cynara,' of which the 'Day 
that I have loved' is the culmination. But he 
loved to make fun of it, and of himself in it ; for 
all through his life his irony played first on him- 
self. Here is the setting of a dialogue: "The 
Close in a purple evening in June. The air is 
full of the sound of cricket and the odour of the 
sunset. On a green bank Rupert is lying. There 
is a mauve cushion beneath his head, and in his 
hand E. Dowson's collected poems, bound in pale 
sorrowful green. He is clothed in indolence and 
flannels. Enter Arthur." 'Good-morrow,' says 
Arthur. 'What a tremulous sunset!' But that 
is all he is allowed to say. Rupert proceeds with 
an elaborately 'jewelled' harangue, ending 'I 
thank you for this conversation. You talk won- 

1 A little parody with which he won a Westminster Gazette prize 
in 1907 may be worth preserving here: "From 'Marius the Bank 
Clerk/ by Walter Pater (Book II. Chap, ix., 'Procrastination'). 
Well! it was there, as he beat upon the station gate (that so sym- 
bolic barrier!) and watched the receding train, that the idea came 
upon him; casting, as it were, a veil of annoyance over the vague 
melancholy of his features; and filling, not without a certain 
sedate charm, as of a well-known ritual, his mind with a now 
familiar sense of loss — a very desiderium — a sense only momentar- 
ily perceptible, perhaps, among the other emotions and thoughts, 
that swarmed, like silver doves, about his brain." 



20 RUPERT BROOKE 

der fully. I love listening to epigrams. I won- 
der if the dead still delight in epigrams. I love 
to think of myself seated on the greyness of 
Lethe's banks, and showering ghosts of epigrams 
and shadowy paradoxes upon the assembled 
wan-eyed dead. We shall smile, a little wearily 
I think, remembering. . . . Farewell.' Tare- 
well,' says poor Arthur, opening his mouth for 
the second time — and exit. 

"I am busy with an enormous romance, of 
which I have written five chapters. It begins 
with my famous simile * about the moon, but soon 
gets much more lewd. One of the chief char- 
acters is a dropsical leper whose limbs and fea- 
tures have been absorbed in one vast soft paunch. 
He looks like a great human slug, and he croaks 
infamous little songs from a wee round mouth 
with yellow lips. The others are less respectable. 

"Did you see the bowdlerised decadent? 2 I 
suppose the scenery looked extremely valuable. 
I dare not witness it. Nero is one of the few 
illusions I have left. All my others are depart- 
ing one by one. I read a book recently which 
proved that Apollo was an aged Chieftain who 
lived in Afghanistan and had four wives and 
cancer in the stomach ; and the other day I found 

a This was as follows: — "The moon was like an enormous yellow 
scab on the livid flesh of some leper." 
2 Nero at His Majesty's Theatre. 



A MEMOIR 21 

myself — my last hope! — acting on moral prin- 
ciples." 

"This morning I woke with ophthalmia," he 
wrote in another letter, "one of the many dis- 
eases raging through Rugby. It is all owing to 
a divine mistake. I wanted to get rose-rash, be- 
ing both attracted by the name and desirous to 
have the disease over before the time of the Ital- 
ian 'tour' came. Therefore yestre'en I prayed to 
iEsculapius a beautiful prayer in Sapphics — it 

began, I think, ifiepos vvv earl podois Trvpkrreiv, . . . but 

either my Greek was unintelligible, or the names 
of ills have changed since iEsculapius, for I 
awoke and found the God had sent me this, the 
least roseate of diseases." 

He wished, of course, or rather wished to be 
thought to wish, to shock and astonish the re- 
spectable; but he did not in practice go very far 
in that diretcion. His hair, slightly longer than 
usual, has already been mentioned. Ties might 
not be coloured; but there was no rule against 
their being 'pufF and made of crepe de chine; 
and such ties he wore, as did the other school 
swells. It was amusing to cause a flutter in the 
orthodox School Societies, of which he was really 
an active and enthusiastic member, though one 
might not think so from his accounts of their 
proceedings. "Last Sunday I read a little paper 



22 RUPERT BROOKE 

on Atalanta, and was mightily pleased. The 
usual papers we have are on such subjects as 
Hood or Calverley — 'something to make you 
laugh.' ... I saw my opportunity, and took it. 
'Have I not,' I said, 'many a time and oft been 
bored beyond endurance by such Philistines? 
Now my revenge comes; I shall be merciless!' 
So I prepared a very long and profound paper, 
full of beautiful quotations, and read it to them 
for a long time, and they were greatly bored. 
They sat round in chairs and slumbered uneasily, 
moaning a little; while I in the centre ranted 
fragments of choruses and hurled epithets upon 
them. At length I ended with Meleager's last 
speech, and my voice was almost husky with 
tears; so that they woke, and wondered greatly, 
and sat up, and yawned, and entered into a dis- 
cussion on Tragedy, wherein I advanced the most 
wild and heterodox and antinomian theories, and 
was very properly squashed. So, you see, even 
in Rugby the Philistines don't get in their own 
way always." 

"I am finishing my paper on James Thomson. 1 
I have cut out all the wicked parts, but I still 
fear for the reception. Last week we had a pa- 
per on T. Gray. The stupendous ass who wrote 

1 He had 'ransacked the eight bookshops in Charing Cross Road' 
for Thomson's works. (This is, of course, the author of the City 
of Dreadful Night, not of the Seasons.) 



A MEMOIR 23 

and read it, after referring to the Elegy as 'a 
fine lyric,' ended with the following incompara- 
ble words: 'In conclusion, we may give Gray a 
place among the greatest, above all, except per- 
haps Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson.' This 
lewd remark roused me from the carefully- 
studied pose of irritating and sublime noncha- 
lance which I assume on such ocasions. I arose, 
and made acid and quite unfair criticisms of 
Gray and Tennyson, to the concealed delight of 
all the avowed Philistines there, and the open 
disgust of the professing 'lovers of literature.' 
I was nearly slain." 

He wrote quantities of poetry at Rugby, a very 
little of which he thought worth preserving in 
the '1905-1908' section of his first book. Some 
of it appeared in the Phoenix, a free-lance school 
paper of which he was twin-editor, and some in 
the Venture, which succeeded the Phoenix. His 
verse of this time shows a good ear, and a love 
of 'beautiful' words, but not much else. A good 
deal of it was written when he ought to have been 
otherwise employed. "I shall sit in a gondola," 
he wrote when he was going to Venice in April, 
1906, "and pour forth satires in heroic verse, or 
moral diatribes in blank verse. Intense sur- 
roundings always move me to write in an op- 
posite vein. I gaze on the New Big School, and 



\* 



<* 



24 RUPERT BROOKE 

give utterance to frail diaphanous lyrics, sudden 
and beautiful as a rose-petal. And when I do 
an hour's 'work' with the Headmaster, I fill note- 
books with erotic terrible fragments at which 
even Sappho would have blushed and trembled.' ' 

In 1904 he was given an extra prize for a poem 
on The Pyramids, and next year he won the real 
prize with one on The Bastile, which he recited on 
June 24th. "The speeches were rather amusing. 
I am informed that my effort was one of the only 
two audible; and as the other was in a foreign 
tongue, I carried off the honours. I am also told 
— by a cricketer friend of mine — that half the 
audience were moved to laughter, the other half 
to tears, which I regard as a compliment, though 
I can understand the feelings of neither half. 
Anyhow I got a Browning and a Rossetti out of 
it, which is something, though they are in prize- 
binding." 

Next year he had to fall back on prose. "I 
have undertaken to write an Essay for a prize. 
If I win this I shall stand up next Speech Day 
and recite weird 'historical' platitudes to a vast 
slumbrous audience. The idea is so pleasingly 
incongruous that I desire to realize it. More- 
over, I once airily told a pedantic and aged man 
that if I liked I could understand even History, 



. A MEMOIR 25 

and he, scoffing, stirred my pride to prove it. 
Therefore I am going to write an Essay on "The 
Influence of William III. on England.' Of 
William III. I know very little. He was a King, 
or something, they say, of the time of Congreve 
and Wycherley. Of England I know nothing. 
I thought you might aid me in a little matter like 
this. If ever you have written an epic, a mono- 
graph, an anthology, or a lyric on William III., 
please send it to me that I may quote it in full." 
He won the prize (the King's Medal for Prose) ; 
and as he got into the XI. at about the same 
time, he left Rugby with honours thick upon 
him. 



II 



His first year at King's (1906-7) was rather 
unsatisfactory. He regretted Rugby; and he 
was (as always) rather shy, and (for the first 
and only time) a little on the defensive with the 
strange people. The 'decadent' pose lingered; 
he had Aubrey Beardsleys in his room, sat up 
very late, and didn't get up in the morning. He 
thought it right to live entirely for the things 
of the mind ; his passion for the country had not 
yet begun, and it seemed to him a wicked waste 
of time to walk or swim — two things which came 



26 RUPERT BROOKE 

soon afterwards to give him as much pleasure 
as anything in the world. 

His letters are plaintive: "This place is rather 
funny to watch; and a little wearying. ... At 
certain moments I perceive a pleasant kind of 
peace in the grey ancient walls and green lawns 
among which I live ; a quietude that doesn't com- 
pensate for the things I have loved and left, but 
at times softens their outlines a little. If only I 
were a poet, I should love such a life very greatly, 
'remembering moments of passion in tranquil- 
lity' ; but being first and chiefly only a boy, I am 
restless and unable to read or write. . . . These 
people are often clever, and always wearying. 
The only persons I ever make any effort to see 
are two who came up with me from my House 
at Rugby. Here across the Styx we wander 
about together and talk of the upper world, and 
sometimes pretend we are children again." 

He joined the A.D.C., and played Stingo in 
She Stoops to Conquer; but his chief public ap- 
pearance in his first term was in the Greek play, 
the Eumenides. "The idea of my playing 
Hermes fell through," he wrote to his Mother, 
"but they have given me the equally large part 
of the Herald. I stand in the middle of the 
stage and pretend to blow a trumpet, while some- 
body in the wings makes a sudden noise. The 



A MEMOIR 27 

part is not difficult." "I wear a red wig and 
cardboard armour," he wrote in another letter, 
"and luckily am only visible for a minute." It 
turned out that he was one of the successes of 
the evening. His radiant, youthful figure in gold 
and vivid red and blue, like a Page in the Ric- 
cardi Chapel, stood strangely out against the 
stuffy decorations and dresses which pervaded 
those somewhat palmy days of the Cambridge 
Theatre. After eleven years, the impression is 
still vivid. 

At the beginning of next term his elder 
brother died suddenly. They were very fond of 
each other, and this was, I suppose, his first great 
sorrow. "It seems so strange that you haven't 
heard," he wrote. "I had thought that all the 
world must know. I suppose I ought to have 
written and told you; but there were so many 
letters to write; and I had to try to comfort 
Mother a little. Dick died on Sunday the 13th 
after a week's illness. Father was with him — 
but I don't think details matter much. ... I 
came up here on Tuesday, partly to escape my 
Rugby school-friends, and partly that I might be 
alone." 

"I'm rather wretched and ill," he writes a lit- 
tle later. "In my 'literary life' I have taken the 
last step of infamy, and become — a reviewer! 



28 RUPERT BROOKE 

I've undertaken to 'do' great slabs of minor 
poetry for the Cambridge Review. I've read 
volumes of them, all the same, and all exactly 
the stuff I write. I often wonder whether I 
haven't written several of them myself under a 
pseudonym, and forgotten about it." 

In his first Long Vacation, 1 "I work hundreds 
of hours a day," he writes, "at stuffy classics, and 
ooze with grammar. To save my soul, I write 
thousands of poems in the evening, and burn 
them. I'll quote to you one verse of an im- 
mensely long one in six cantos, entitled 'A Song 
Illustrative of a Sense of Incompatibility be- 
tween Self and Universe ; also In Favour of De- 
cease.' 

Things are beasts, 

Alas! and Alack! 
If life is a succession of choreic anapaests, 
When, ah! when shall we arrive at the Parcemiac?" 

Part of this Long was spent at Lulworth, 
where he wrote to his Mother: "One day we 
were reading on the rocks, and I had a Keats in 
my pocket, and it slipped out, and, falling into a 
swift current, was borne out to sea. So we leapt 
into a boat and rowed up and down the coast 

*I may as well mention that I first met him just after the end 
of the May Term this year. After this I saw him at intervals, and 
we knew each other pretty well by the summer of 1909, 



A MEMOIR 29 

till we espied it off some rocks. But the sea was 
rather rough and we could not land on that rocky 
part, or get near Keats. So we landed half a 
mile off on a beach, and came over the rocks to 
the Keats; and when we found it, I stripped and 
went in after it and got it. It is indeed quite 
spoilt; but it only cost two shillings to begin 
with." (He did not know at this time of an as- 
sociation which he discovered four years after- 
wards. "Oh, I've read Keats," he writes in 1911, 
"and found the most amazing thing. The last 
place he was in was Lulworth. His ship was be- 
calmed outside. He and Severn went ashore and 
clambered about the rocks all day — his last fairly 
happy day. He went aboard and wrote, that 
evening, his last poem — that sonnet. The ship 
took him on to Italy, coughing blood and suf- 
fering Hell because he wouldn't see Fanny any 
more. Fanny sat in Hampstead, with Mr. 
Brown. It was at the end of Sept. 1820 . . .") 
There is a gloomy letter of the day after his 
birthday, when he became twenty. "I am now 
in the depths of despondency because of my age. 
I'm filled with an hysterical despair to think of 
fifty dull years more. I hate myself and every- 
one. I've written almost no verse for ages; and 
shall never write any more. I've forgotten all 
rhythm and metre. The words 'anapaestic dimeter 



80 RUPERT BROOKE 

acatalectic,' that fired me once, now leave me cold. 
The sunset or a child's face no longer reminds me 
of a bucolic caesura. But I still read plaintively, 
to pass the time." And he can still write at the 
end of this Long: "Go back to Cambridge for 
my second year and laugh and talk with those 
old dull people on that airless plain! The 
thought fills me with hideous ennui," 

But this mood was already something of a lit- 
erary survival, and well understood to be so by 
his friends. He went back to games, especially 
football ; and by the beginning of his second year 
he had become one of the most interested and in- 
teresting people at Cambridge. 

A young Apollo, golden-haired, 

Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, 

Magnificently unprepared 

For the long littleness of life. 

Mrs. Cornford's epigram on him is well known, 
but one could not write about his great days at 
Cambridge without quoting it — bitter though the 
irony of 'long' has now become. 

Henceforward friends and avocations crowded 
on him. He had been the chief advocate of the 
Labour Party at Rugby; and (at King's he joined 
various societies, political and intellectual, mostly 
more or less revolutionary-4the University 



A MEMOIR 31 

Fabian Society, of which he became President 
for the year 1909-10; the Carbonari; and the 
Heretics. He also belonged to that old, great, 
secret, but vaguely famous Brotherhood from 
which the membership of Tennyson and others 
of the illustrious has lifted a corner of the veil. 
J. T. Sheppard, Fellow of King's, gives an ac- 
count of some among these activities. "The Car- 
bonari, I think, he founded; a Society which, in 
spite of its terrifying name, was very friendly. 
The paper and the talk which followed it at the 
one meeting to which, as an elderly person, I 
was allowed admission, were frank and amusing, 
but my chief memory is of the cheerful kindli- 
ness of the members. Then there were the Fa- 
bians, whom he sometimes entertained to a frugal 
supper of bread and cheese and beer in his rooms, 
and to whom he never tired of teaching the im- 
portance of poets and artists in the good society 
which is to be built up by our children. His ad- 
vice to the State was very practical. Since poets 
and artists matter, and since they need time for 
development, we, who are. not the poets and the 
artists, ought to organise the material requisites, 
bread and cheese and leisure, for those who seem 
to show the promise of good work. He believed 
that you do not improve a poet by starving and 
neglecting him; and one good way of showing 



32 RUPERT BROOKE 

that we remember him would be to remember also 
that it is our duty to buy as well as read the works 
of the poets who are still writing." 

Rupert indeed wore his Socialism with a dif- 
ference, which comes out in a letter of December, 
1907, thanking his uncle, Mr. Clement Cotterill, 
for his book, Human Justice for those at the Bot- 
tom, in which he says that he has been urging his 
Socialist friends at Cambridge, especially the Fa- 
bians, to take a more human view of things. "So- 
cialism is making great advances at Oxford and 
Cambridge just now; but its upholders are too 
apt to make it seem, to others and to themselves, 
a selfish scheme of economics. They confound 
the means with the end; and think that a Com- 
pulsory Living Wage is the end, instead of a 
good beginning. Bernard Shaw came down last 
term, and made a speech that was enthusiastically 
received, in which he advised a state of things 
in which each 'class' had its own party in Parlia- 
ment fighting for its own hand. The whole thing 
was based on selfishness. It was not inspiring. 

"Of course they're really sincere, energetic, 
useful people, and they do a lot of good work. 
But, as I've said, they're rather hard. Must 
every cause lose part of its ideal, as it becomes 
successful? And also they are rather intolerant, 
especially towards the old order. They some- 



A MEMOIR 33 

times seem to take it for granted that all rich 
men, and all Conservatives (and most ordinary 
Liberals) are heartless villains. I have already, 
thanks, in part, to some words of yours, got some 
faith in the real, sometimes overgrown, goodness 
of all men; and that is why I have found your 
book so good, as a confirmation rather than a 
revelation. And this faith I have tried to ham- 
mer into those Socialists of my generation whom 
I have come across. But it's sometimes hard. 
The prejudices of the clever are harder to kill 
than those of the dull. Also I sometimes won- 
der whether this Commercialism, or Competition, 
or whatever the filthy infection is, hasn't spread 
almost too far, and whether the best hope isn't 
in some kind of upheaval." 

All this is supplemented in an account written 
by Hugh Dalton, an intimate friend of this time. 
"During our years at Cambridge, Fabianism was 
at its high tide, and attracted most of those who 
had any social enthusiasm worth speaking of. 
Rupert joined the C.U.F.S. in April, 1907. He 
came to me, I remember, and said, 'I'm not your 
sort of Socialist; I'm a William Morris sort of 
Socialist, but I want to join your Society as an 
Associate.' He became a full member a year 
later. Like many of us, he was falling by then 
under the subtle influence of the Webbs, and 



34 RUPERT BROOKE 

simultaneously the atmosphere of Cambridge was 
teaching him to value and to cultivate lucidity of 
thought and precision of reasoning. He soon saw 
the intellectual limitations of a 'William Morris 
sort of Socialist,' and though he never studied 
the fine points of economics, he came to talk very 
good sense on the larger , economic questions. 

"It was through the meetings of the Carbonari 
that I first came to know him, well. This was a 
society of our contemporaries in King's, about a 
dozen, which we formed in our first term for pa- 
pers and discussions. Rupert and I and one or 
two others were generally the last to separate, 
and sometimes the dawn was in the sky before 
we got to bed. We walked round the Courts 
and beside the river for hours, trying to get 
things clear. For we wanted, half passionately 
and half humorously, to get everything clear 
quickly. Hitherto, we thought, we had been too 
young to think, and soon we might be too busy, 
and ultimately we should be too old. The golden 
time was now. 

" 'There are only three things in the world,' he 
said once, vehemently answering some Carbonaro 
who had been talking like a Philistine, 'one is to 
read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the 
best of all is to live poetry!' And I remember 
his saying that at rare moments he had glimpses 



A MEMOIR 35 

of what poetry really meant, how it solved all 
'problems of conduct and settled all questions of 
values. Moreover, it kept men young, he 
thought. One night we were sitting at a high 
window overlooking King's Parade. We had been 
discussing some philosophical point about the na- 
ture of Beauty, when we saw and heard some 
drunken members of another college going home. 
'Those fellows,' he said, 'would think us very old 
if they had been in this room to-night, but when 
they go down and sit on office stools, they will 
grow old quite suddenly, and many years hence 
we shall still be talking and thinking about these 
sorts of things, and we shall still be young.' 

"As for philosophy, he shared the general view 
of the set in which we moved that ethics were ex- 
ceedingly important, but metaphysics rather 
trivial; that it mattered immensely what was 
good, but comparatively little what was real. I 
remember several fierce arguments 1 as to whether 
a man's character, as distinct from the series of 
states of mind through which he passed, could be 
good in itself, and also a controversy as to whether 
states of affairs, as distinct from the states of 
mind of the persons concerned in them, could be 
good in themselves. Rupert maintained that 

1 A rgument, it will be remembered, at Youth's Funeral, was too 
full of woe to speak.' 



36 RUPERT BROOKE 

Variety was good in itself. 'A world contain- 
ing you and me and Maynard Keynes/ he said, 
'is obviously better than a world containing three 
people exactly like any one of us!' " 

One of the most significant and absorbing of 
his activities was the dramatic. Here I must 
quote from E. J. Dent's admirable record: 
"When I came back to Cambridge in the autumn 
of 1907, I soon became aware that a new spirit 
was making itself felt. Probably it was active 
in more ways than I was able to observe; but 
the first notable result of it was the perform- 
ance of Marlowe's Faustus in November by a 
number of men who afterwards constituted 
themselves as the Marlowe Dramatic Society. 
The new spirit seemed to come partly from 
Rugby, partly from Bedales, and by an odd co- 
incidence the two leaders, though not related, 
bore the same name : Rupert and Justin Brooke. 
It was a queer performance. The elder genera- 
tion were scandalised almost before the play be- 
gan: no scenery, only dingy green hangings, no 
music, no footlights, frequent 'black-outs,' no 
names of the actors printed. And all this in the 
A.D.C. Theatre, with its familiar portraits, its 
familiar memories ! No wonder they were upset 
by it all. 'Faustus isn't a play at all' — 'absurd 



A MEMOIR 37 

for undergraduates to attempt tragedy' — 'why 
didn't they get somebody with experience to 
coach them?' — 'why do they act in the dark?' — 
'not always in very nice taste.' It was indeed a 
queer performance. Faustus looked absurdly 
young; Mephistopheles (Rupert), his face com- 
pletely hidden by his cowl, generally turned his 
back to the audience, and spoke in a thick indis- 
tinct voice which often served merely as a back- 
ground to the piercing whispers of the Master of 

, whose thirst for information was insatiable. 

But in spite of these things and many others, in 
spite of the tedious humour of the comic scenes, 
the play had a new spirit of its own. The tragic 
moments were genuinely moving. Crude, awk- 
ward, and amateurish as it all was, there was the 
spirit of true poetry about it. One felt that to 
these actors poetry was the greatest thing in life. 
"The Marlowe group were inclined to be sus- 
picious, perhaps not unjustly, of anyone who was 
a member of the Senate. But as I had been one 
of the few to admit themselves sincerely im- 
pressed by Faustus, I was occasionally allowed 
to hear news of their next project. Milton was to 
be commemorated in the summer, 1 and the young 

1 By this time the Authorities had come round to the Marlowe 
Society, and Christ's College bespoke a special performance of its 
Comus for their celebration of the Tercentenary. 



38 RUPERT BROOKE 

poets were going to have a hand in it. Rupert 
was to be seen almost daily, I believe, in Room 
Theta, studying vast books on theatre-construc- 
tion; a kind friend brought out for him his copy 
of the Trinity Milton facsimile, for the settling 
of points of textual criticism ; and mysterious de- 
signs for costumes and scenery were handed 
round, in which wonderful effects a la Gordon 
Craig were to be obtained with scaffold poles. 

"It is difficult to criticise Comus, or to write the 
history of its preparation. It had much the same 
faults and the same merits as Faustus, though on 
a larger scale. Rupert was not a good actor, 1 
nor even a good speaker of verse. Yet I feel now 
that anyone who remembers Comus, and remem- 
bers it with ever so slight a sense of beauty, will 
think of Rupert as the central figure of it; and 
watching rehearsals daily, as I did, I felt that, 
however much his personal beauty might count 
for, it was his passionate devotion to the spirit 
of poetry that really gave Comus its peculiar and 
indescribable atmosphere. 

"Comus, however unimportant to the world at 
large, did, in fact, mean a great deal for Rupert 
and his friends. It was the first time that he had 

1 He took the part of the Attendant Spirit. It is only fair to 
say that this view of his acting, or at any rate of his elocution, was 
far from universal, 



A MEMOIR 39 

had to bear the responsibility of a large under- 
taking, and he addressed himself to it in the spirit 
of a scholar. It deepened his sense of poetry, 
of drama, and of music; it made him develop an 
ideal continually present in his mind, even in 
later years, which gave solidity to his group, the 
ideal of Cambridge, of young Cambridge, as the 
source from which the most vital movements in 
literature, art, and drama, were to spring. Comus 
effected an intimate collaboration of all sorts of 
brains, and it effected especially a co-operation 
of men and women. Rupert was by no means the 
only remarkable person in the circle. He had, 
moreover, a power of making friends with women 
as well as with men, and although Comus was 
probably a symptom rather than a cause, it was 
from about that time that joint societies, such as 
the Heretics and the Fabians, began to make a 
new influence felt." 

Rupert was knocked up by his exertions over 
Comus. He wrote from Rugby to Mrs. Cornf ord 
(then Miss Frances Darwin) : "I went off with- 
out even saying good-bye or thank-you to people. 
My mother (I can plead) packed me up and 
snatched me here to sleep and recover. I am now 
convalescent, and can sit up and take a little 
warm milk-and-Tennyson. I feel a deserter; but 
I can always adduce the week when the Commit- 



40 RUPERT BROOKE 

tee went to the seaside, and I faced the world and 
Albert's Artistic Temperament alone." * 

He had written to his mother about this week, 
and about another matter. "Albert [Ruther- 
ston], who is painting our scenery, is staying with 
me. We paint in the theatre, 9 to 5 every day. 
I daub a little, but most of the time carry and 
empty pails, run errands, wind pulleys, etc. . . . 
I suppose you heard of the dreadful tragedy that 
happened last Saturday week — [Walter] Head- 
lam's death? It was terribly sudden. He was 
about in King's all the week — kept the procession 
for the Chancellor's installation on Wednesday 
waiting for half an hour by being late — in his 
usual way! On Friday he was in King's, about, 
as usual. Friday evening he went up to town, 
had a slight operation (by some accounts), and 
died on Saturday morning. ... It made me 
quite miserable and ill for some days. One gets 
so angry at that sort of thing. I didn't know 
him very well. But he was the one classic I really 
admired and liked ; 2 and I had done a good deal 
of work with him. The papers made very little 
of it. He published so little that outside people 

x It was at about this time that he bought two drawings by 
Augustus John, "very splendid ones — even the critical Albert ad- 
mitted that, and confessed jealousy." 

2 It was not till later that he knew A. W. Verrall, whom he 
'admired and liked' very much, 



A MEMOIR 41 

didn't know much of him. But his friends, and 
we who were his pupils, knew his great genius. 
I don't know how much of him they will be able 
to rake together from his papers. But all the 
great, ripe, splendid works we all proudly looked 
forward to him achieving — which we knew he 
might consummate any time he gave himself a 
few months, have died with him: can never be 
made. That's the terrible thing. Even in Cam- 
bridge many people knew of him most as a bril- 
liant 'scholar,' i. e. y emender of Greek texts. But 
he was also about the best writer of Greek there 
has been since the Greeks. And what I loved so in 
him was his extraordinary and living apprecia- 
tion of all English poetry, modern and ancient. 
To hear him repeat it was a delight. He was an 
excellent poet himself, and had perfect taste. He 
first inspired me with a desire to get Comus done, 
a term or two ago, and has often talked about it 
since. I had made up, in my mind, a little list 
of things about which I was going to ask him, 
large and small points, to make certain that we 
should interpret and understand it in the best 
way possible; but I put it off till too late. . . . 
The whole thing makes me so rebellious — to think 
what the world has lost." 



42 RUPERT BROOKE 

The vacations were spent in all sorts of ways : 
at the Fabian Summer School, or camping out 
with smaller groups of friends ; on walking tours ; 
or, at Christmas, with large heterogeneous par- 
ties for winter-sports in Switzerland. He told 
his mother of his plans for one of the Swiss ex- 
cursions in the winter of 1908. "What I meant 
about the holidays is this. It is quite true that 
I have plenty of opportunities of resting. But 
I always feel that I oughtn't to, and can't, do 
nothing. There are so many things I must learn 
and do, and there is not too much time. My 
brain must be working. And so the only way 
(I find) I have a real holiday from my work, is 
on a walking-tour, or in Switzerland; times and 
places where it is impossible to think or read for 
more than five minutes. In a way such things 
are a waste of time. And I can't imagine any- 
thing I should hate more than a long 'holiday' 
like that, of more than a week or ten days. It 
would be intolerable. But, I think, just a week's 
mental rest strengthens a mind for some time. 
This sounds rather priggish; but I'm really very 
much in earnest about reading and writing." 

The Swiss relaxations used to include the per- 
formance of a play, or even an opera — the Im- 
portance of Being Earnest, in which Rupert 



A MEMOIR 43 

played Algernon, or a nonsense-melodrama writ- 
ten in collaboration by the party, but mostly by 
him. In the opera he was obliged at the last 
moment, by the sudden defection of the tenor, 
to play the hero. He couldn't sing a note; and 
the difficulty was got over by making the actor 
who played his valet stand beside him in a 
rigid position and sing, while Rupert did the 
gestures. 

The English holidays were more peaceful. 
"Overcote is a lovely place," he wrote to his 
mother on one of them, "with nothing but an old 
inn, and a ferry. There are villages round, a 
mile or two away, but hidden. And there's just 
the Ouse, a slow stream, and some trees and fields, 
and an immense expanse of sky. There were a 
lot of wild birds about, wild duck, and snipe, and 
herons." 

All these occasions produced floods of doggerel, 
some of which is amusing — from a snatch of blank 
verse on an unfortunate town-bred friend who 
arrived late on a wet night at a camp where all 
the beds were occupied, and didn't rise to the 
occasion : 

In the late evening he was out of place, 
And infinitely irrelevant at dawn, 



U RUPERT BROOKE 

— to the following elaborate ballade, composed 
during a sleepless night when he and Dudley 
Ward, 1 coming very late into Cranborne, couldn't 
find the inn which they had picked out in the 
guide-book for the sake of its name : 

In Cranborne town two inns there are, 
And one the Fleur-de-Lys is hight, 

And one, the inn Victoria, 2 

Where, for it was alone in sight, 

We turned in tired and tearful plight 

Seeking for warmth, and company, 

And food, and beds so soft and white — 

These things are at the Fleur-de-Lys. 

Where is the ointment for the scar? 

Slippers? and table deftly dight? 
Sofas? tobacco? soap? and ah! 

Hot water for a weary wight? 

Where is the food, in toil's despite? 
The golden eggs? the toast? the tea? 

The maid so pretty and polite? 
These things are at the Fleur-de-Lys. 

Oh, we have wandered far and far, 
We are fordone and wearied quite. 

No lamp is lit; there is no star. 
Only we know that in the night 
We somewhere missed the faces bright, 

*A Cambridge friend, not to be confused with the Member of 
Parliament of the same name. 

a Showing that a Grantchester man can make cockney rhymes 
just like a Barton man. 



A MEMOIR 45 

The lips and eyes we longed to see; 

And Love, and Laughter, and Delight. 
These things are at the Fleur-de-Lys. 

Prince, it is dark to left and right. 

Waits there an inn for you and me? 
Fine noppy ale and red firelight? 

These things are at the Fleur-de-Lys. 

The next was written at a very favourite inn, 
the Pink and Lily, near Prince's Risborough, on 
one occasion when he went there with Jacques 
Raverat. 

Never came there to the Pink 
Two such men as we, I think. 
Never came there to the Lily 
Two men quite so richly silly ; x 
So broad, so supple, and so tall, 
So modest and so brave withal, 
With hearts so clear, such noble eyes, 
Filled with such sage philosophies, 
Thirsty for Good, secure of Truth, 
Fired by a purer flame than youth, 
Serene as age, but not so dirty, 
Old, young, mature, being under thirty. 
Were ever two so fierce and strong, 
Who drank so deep, and laughed so long, 
So proudly meek, so humbly proud, 
Who walked so far, and sang so loud? 

1 This couplet, which is inconsistent with the rest, was supplied 
by his companion. 



46 RUPERT BROOKE 

The last I will quote was pinned to some food 
which they left by the roadside after luncheon: 

Two men left this bread and cake 
For whomsoever finds to take. 
He and they will soon be dead. 
Pray for them that left this bread. 



From this time the story shall be told as far 
as possible in extracts from Rupert Brooke's let- 
ters to his friends, from which his character will 
appear far more vividly, and on the whole more 
clearly, than from anything that could be written 
about it. But the picture thus given must for 
various reasons be incomplete, and perhaps mis- 
leading; and a few touches must here be added, 
to be borne in mind while the letters are read. 

They might, for instance, give the idea of self- 
absorption. Self-conscious he was, self-examin- 
ing, and self -critical, to the last degree; but 
hardly ever self-absorbed. The extracts cannot 
show his continual helpfulness and serviceable- 
ness to his friends, both in large matters which 
are too private, and in details which are too 
trivial, to be chronicled. "There was a deep- 
seated generosity in him," says Mrs. Cornford, 
"at once sensible and tender. I used to think that 
the real reason the charm of his face struck peo- 



A MEMOIR 47 

pie so greatly was because its clearness and fair- 
ness were not simply a happy accident of youth, 
but expressed this innate quality in him. . . . He 
was endlessly kind in helping me with my verses 
(except that kindness seems the wrong word, be- 
cause he did it as a matter of course ) . He would 
sit for an hour or two at a time, generally on the 
ground, frowning and biting the end of his pencil 
and scribbling little notes on the margin before 
we talked. Of the better things he would only 
say 'I like that,' or 'That's good.' I can't imagine 
him using a word of that emotional jargon in 
which people usually talk or write of poetry. He 
made it feel more like carpentering." Here we 
see him as he often was, just simple and serious, 
full of the business of the moment. Indeed he 
was very restful to be with. The eager, work- 
ing, excited brain which shows in the letters, in- 
cessantly registering, assimilating, juggling with, 
sensations and impressions, hid its thrills under 
an appearance almost of placidity. He never 
'put himself forward,' and seldom took the lead, 
in conversation; someone spoke of 'the beauty of 
his eyes looking steadily and without mocking 
into quite ordinary talk.' But he was 'noticing' 
all the time; he had the power which women are 
supposed to have of knowing everything that is 



48 RUPERT BROOKE 

going on in the room; and he seemed never to 
forget the smallest detail. 

His observation was always, if not 'mocking/ 
at any rate amused ; and something must be said 
about the peculiar quality of his irony and his 
humour, which were very intimate, and might be 
misunderstood by strangers. J. T. Sheppard has 
written admirably about them, as they played on 
his friends. "He would laugh at them, and some- 
times treat their most cherished enthusiasms as 
amusing, if harmless foibles ; but he had not the 
power, possessed by some people who matter less, 
of making you seem small and dull. His society 
was, in the good sense, comfortable. He loved 
children, and when he treated his grown-up 
friends as rather absurd but very nice children, 
they would have had to be very absurd indeed to 
resent it. It must have been very hard to be 
pompous or priggish in his company." He 
treated himself in much the same way. If there 
was any fun to be got out of a laugh against him, 
far from grudging it, he gave every facility; but 
he liked to have the first go at it himself. There 
was always some foundation for the jokes; but 
the truth and the fun were inextricably mixed 
up, and one had to know exactly how many grains 
of salt to take. As an obvious instance: it was 
certainly his usual belief that he was, or at any 



A MEMOIR 49 

rate had it in him to be, a good poet; and so he 
would describe himself as the first poet of the 
age, because it would be funny if he thought so, 
and therefore it was amusing to say so ; and there 
was no risk of his correspondents thinking him 
cocksure. In the same way he would pick out his 
best lines for special praise. "There's one superb 
line," he said to me when he first showed me the 
sonnet Love. " 'Astonishment is no more in hand 
or shoulder.' Isn't it amazing?" He did think 
it good, and was enjoying what Keats calls 'the 
reperception and ratification of what is fine' in 
his own work; but he said it with a twinkle. ^ 

He always loved to dramatise a situation, and ^fr" 
to make out that he had said or done something 
absurdly striking and stunning. Here is a good 
illustration from a letter of 1909: "And so I 
walked and laughed and met a many people and 
made a thousand songs — all very good — and, in 
the end of the days, came to a woman who was 
more glorious than the sun, and stronger and 
stranger than the sea, and kinder than the earth, 
who is a flower made out of fire, a star that laughs 
all day, whose brain is clean and clear like a man's, 
and her heart is full of courage and kindness ; and 
whom I love. I told her that the Earth was 
crowned with windflowers, and dancing down the 
violet ways of Spring; that Christ had died and 



50 RUPERT BROOKE 

Pan was risen; that her mouth was like the sun- 
light on a gull's wings. As a matter of fact I 
believe I said 'Hullo! isn't it rippin' weather?' " 

"You are the only person, Frances," he wrote 
much later to Mrs. Cornford, "who ever believed 
all my lies. Nothing (short, perhaps, of incredu- 
lity) can shake my devotion to you." 

One more quotation from Sheppard : "He was 
kind and unaffected. But he was not miraculously 
unselfish, nor indifferent to his popularity. The 
fact that in small things he sometimes seemed to 
choose the pleasant second-best, and, as he him- 
self realised, rather eagerly to accept the little 
successes which he could so easily win, should 
make us appreciate not less, but more, the Tight- 
ness and the goodness of his larger choices. He 
was very sensitive to praise, and it would be 
wrong to say that he was always wisely praised. 
But he was sensible enough and strong enough 
to take flattery, in the long run, for what it was 
worth ; and he valued the affection that was criti- 
cal, not flattering. 

"Because he was human, he enjoyed his popu- 
larity. The quality which won it was, I think, his 
power of liking people, and making them feel, 
because he liked them all, not only at their ease 
with him, but also happy and friendly with one 
another. His company had this effect at home, 



A MEMOIR 51 

and in his rooms at King's, in his garden at 
Grantchester, in London, and I am sure wherever 
he went in Germany and in America. Certainly 
the most varied people used to delight in it, and 
he, for his part, was delighted when some of the 
incongruous persons he liked, unexpectedly also 
liked one another. 

"He was in some ways like a child, very frank 
and simple, generally knowing what he wanted, 
and, if he could see it, taking it ; but also, where 
his affections were concerned, most loyal and de- 
voted ; suffering acutely in the few great troubles 
that came to him, but generally confident and 
happy; above all delighting, and making other 
people share his delight, in a great number of 
different things." 



Ill 



He took the Classical Tripos in the summer 
of 1909, only getting a Second. This was a 'dis- 
appointment,' though not specially so to him. 
"He found English literature, now, for him, more 
important than the ancient classics; and he has 
convinced us all that he was right," says Shep- 
pard, himself a Don at King's; so there is no 
need for head-shaking. 

After term, he went to live within easy dis- 



52 RUPERT BROOKE 

tance of Cambridge, at a house in Grantchester 
called the Orchard. Here he spent most of the 
rest of this year, going for the summer holidays 
to a vicarage his parents had taken at Clevedon 
in Somerset, which he was allowed to cram with 
relays of his friends. He was working all these 
months for the Charles Oldham Shakespeare 
prize, which he won in the course of the Michael- 
mas Term. 

He went to Switzerland for Christmas, where 
he got poisoned by drinking some bad water ; and 
he came home to find his father seriously ill with 
hemorrhage on the brain. He had to give up 
Grantchester and Cambridge and all his plans 
for next term, and undertake the temporary 
management of the House at Rugby. He wrote 
to Mrs. Cornford to apologise for backing out of 
his part in The Land of Heart's Desire. "There 
are other things I'm very sick to miss," he went 
on: "the Marlowe play, and Verrail's lectures, 
etc. — seeing you all — the whole life of it, in fact. 
Also I fear I may have confused the Fabians 
rather by not coming up. I'm a general nuisance. 
Oh ! and I'm so sad and fierce and miserable not 
to be in my garden and little house at Grant- 
chester all this term. I love being there so much 
— more than any place I've ever lived in. I love 
the place and especially the solitude so much. I'd 



A MEMOIR 53 

thought of being there when the spring was com- 
ing, every day this winter, and dreamt of seeing 
all the little brown and green things. It's hor- 
rible of me to talk like this when I'm in the house 
with two other people who are infinitely worse 
off in happiness than I am, and one of them in 
pain. . . . Many thanks for your letter, by the 
way. It cheered me greatly at the exact time 
when I was sitting gloomily waiting for my fa- 
ther's return from the London doctor, and won- 
dering what the verdict would be. I had sunk 
into that abysmal darkness which comes on a con- 
valescent when anything goes wrong. I've shaken 
off my dreadful disease now. It inspired me with 
thousands of Hardyesque short poems about peo- 
ple whose affairs went dismally wrong, or fright- 
fully detestable people I couldn't help falling in 
love with, or interviews with the Almighty in 
which He turned out to be an absolute and un- 
imaginative idiot. . . . But I hope to occupy my 
exile by composing some work of immortal 
genius." 

A little later Mr. Brooke died suddenly, and 
was buried on the very day when the fifty boys 
were coming back to School Field. The shock 
was great. Rupert wrote to me in March, thank- 
ing me for a letter, "and indeed for the earlier 
ones to an invalid — though those seem so long 



54 RUPERT BROOKE 

ago that I cannot find continuity between that 
time and this. It is the smallest part of the gulf 
that I have been ill again — I collapsed, unfor- 
givably [with influenza], just after the funeral; 
and again subsisted for days on milk and the 
pieces I could surreptitiously bite out of the end 
of my thermometer. Now, and lately, though, I 
am well and bursting with activity. I work like 
a Professor, and feel the Spring in my bones. I 
am acting Housemaster in my father's place till 
the end of the term. Then we are to be turned 
from this place by cold strangers, into a little 
house with a patch of grass in front, on a road, 
stiff and ugly. ... I find I am an admirable 
schoolmaster. I have a bluff Christian tone that 
is wholly pedagogic. Also, they remember I used 
to play for the School at various violent games, 
and respect me accordingly." 

"My heart is warm," he wrote to Jacques Rav- 
erat, "and has been half secure — or confident, 
rather — throughout the last four centuries (just 
a month ) because of the splendid people I know. 
Half are scattered abroad now. But you'll all 
meet in April. I'll find all of you by August." 

Some of them he did meet in April, when he 
wrote to me from Lulworth : "At length I am es- 
caped from the world's great snare. This is 
heaven. Downs, Hens, Cottages, and the Sun. 



A MEMOIR 55 

• • ♦ For the rest of Eternity my stabile address 
is 24 Bilton Road, Rugby. School Field, that 
palatial building, will know us no more. And 
henceforth I shall have to play on other people's 
tennis lawns. I wept copiously last week on say- 
ing good-bye to the three and fifty little boys 
whose Faith and Morals I had upheld for ten 
weeks. I found I had fallen in love with them 
all. They were so pleasant and fresh-minded 
as they were. And it filled me with purpureal 
gloom to know that their plastic souls would har- 
den into the required shapes, and they would go 
to swell the indistinguishable masses who fill 
Trinity Hall, Clare, Caius . . . and at last be- 
come members of the English Upper, or Upper 
Middle, Classes. I am glad I am not going to 
be a schoolmaster for ever. The tragedy would 
be too great." 

He went back to Grantchester for most of the 
May term, and immediately got caught up again 
in the multiplicity of Cambridge life. "I'm afraid 
there isn't the ghost of a chance," he wrote in an- 
swer to a suggestion that we should go abroad 
together for a fortnight. "I'm so extraordinarily 
inextricable and necessary! You think this con- 
ceit; but it's not. Various bodies and societies 
have arranged things in which I am continuously 
and hopelessly involved. Also my labours at the 



56 RUPERT BROOKE 

University Library press most insistently upon 
me. I wish I could have come, it would have been 
lovely. Grantchester's lovely though, too. When 
are you coming? The apple-blossom and the 
river and the sunsets have combined to make me 
relapse into a more than Wordsworthian com- 
munion with nature, which prevents me reading 
more than 100 lines a day, or thinking at all." 

His work at this time was on the Elizabethan 
drama, mainly for a monograph on 'Puritanism 
as represented or referred to in the early English 
drama up to 1642/ with which he won the Har- 
ness Prize this year. 1 It shows deep reading. 
"I read 20 pre-Elizabethan plays a week, all 
poor," he had written in March; and in April 
from Lulworth, "All the morning I souse my- 
self in Elizabethan plays ; and every afternoon I 
walk up perpendicular places alone, for hours" — 
adding in a moment of surfeit, "There are no 
good plays between 1500 and 1650, except the 
Faithful Shepherdess — and, perhaps, Antony 
and Cleopatra" 

By this time he had already written a good 
many of the poems which were to appear in the 
1908-1911 section of his first book, and he was 
writing more. "I am slowly recovering from 

X A copy of this essay is in the British Museum Library. 



A MEMOIR 57 

Work/' he wrote to Mrs. Cornford. "Hence- 
forth I am going to lead what Dudley calls 'a 
Life Dedicated to Art.' Hurray!" Mrs. Corn- 
ford and he both had plans for publishing a vol- 
ume of poems in 1910 — (hers was carried out, 
his postponed) . "They will review us together!" 
he told her. "The Daily Chronicle, or some such, 
that reviews verse in lumps, will notice thirty- 
four minor poets in one day, ending with 
Thoughts in Verse on many Occasions, by a Per- 
son of Great Sensibility, by F. Cornford, and 
Dead Pansy-Leaves, and other Flowerets, by R. 
Brooke; and it will say, 'Mr. Cornford has some 
pretty thoughts; but Miss Brooke is always in- 
tolerable' (they always guess the sex wrong). 
And then I shall refuse to call on you. Or an- 
other paper will say, 'Major Cornford and the 
Widow Brooke are both bad; but Major Corn- 
ford is the worst.' And then you will cut me in 
the street." 

The Marlowe Society's second performance 
of Dr. Faustus, got up for a party of fifty Ger- 
man students who visited Cambridge in August, 
was one excitement of this summer ; and another 
was a tour with Dudley Ward in a disreputable- 
looking caravan, to popularise the Minority Re- 
port on the Poor Law in the principal towns on 
the South Coast — except Bournemouth, through 



58 RUPERT BROOKE 

which they drove, bare-headed and barefoot, at 
full speed, in fear or hope of being seen by a 
Conservative aunt who lived there. 

Next month he wrote to F. H. Keeling 1 from 
Rugby. The letter is dated September 20th- 
23rd, 1910: "IVe several times started to write 
you a notable and rhetorical letter, but my life 
has been too jerky to admit of much connected 
thought lately, so the letter always fizzled away, 
and was not. I'm sorry I didn't write sooner, 
but I wanted to be able to write down a great 
attack on your pessimism in abundant and rea- 
soned language. And such a thing takes time 
and thought. Also, I may agree with you. 

"What is pessimism? Why do you say you 
are becoming a pessimist? What does it mean? 
He may (I say to myself) mean that he thinks 
that the Universe is bad as a whole, or that it's 
bad just now, or that, more locally and import- 
antly, things aren't going to get any better in 
our time and our country, no matter how much 
we preach Socialism and clean hearts at them. 

"Is it the last two? Are you telling us that the 
world is, after all, bad, and, what's more horrible, 
without enough seeds of good in it? I, writing 

1 F. H. Keeling, or as he was always called by his friends, 'Ben* 
Keeling, the chief figure among the Cambridge Fabians of Rupert's 
day, was killed in the Somme Battle of 1916, 



A MEMOIR 59 

poetry and reading books and living at Grant- 
chester all day, feel rather doubtful and ignorant 
about 'the world' — about England, and men, and 
what they're like. Still, I see some, besides the 
University gang. I see all these queer provin- 
cials in this town, upper and middle and lower 
class, and God knows they're sterile enough. 

"But I feel a placid and healthy physician 
about it all (only I don't know what drugs to 
recommend) . This is because I've such an over- 
flowing (if intermittent) flood of anti-pessimism 
in me. I'm using the word now in what I expect 
is its most important sense, of a feeling rather 
than a reasoned belief. The horror is not in 
believing the Universe is bad — or even believing 
the world won't improve — on a reasoned and cool 
examination of all facts, tendencies and values, 
so much as in a sort of general feeling that there 
isn't much potentiality for good in the world, and 
that anyhow it's a fairly dreary business, — an 
absence of much appreciation and hope, and a 
somehow paralysed will for good. As this is a 
feeling, it may be caused by reason and experi- 
ence, or more often by loneliness or soul-measles 
or indigestion or age or anything else. And it 
can equally be cured by other things than reason 
— by energy or weather or good people, as well 
as by a wider ethical grasp. At least, so I've 



60 RUPERT BROOKE 

found in the rather slight and temporary fits of 
depression I've had, in exile or otherwise, lately 
— or even in an enormous period of Youthful 
Tragedy with which I started at Cambridge. I 
have a remedy. It is a dangerous one, but I 
think very good on the whole; though it may 
lead to a sterile but ecstatic content, or even to 
the asylum. In practice, I find, it doesn't — or 
hasn't yet — make me inefficient. ( I am address- 
ing an Adult School on Sunday. I have started 
a group for studying the Minority Report here. 
I am going to Cambridge in a week to oversee, 
with the light of pure reason, the powerful ener- 
gies of those who are setting forth the new 
Fabian Rooms, — and later, to put the rising gen- 
eration, Fabian and otherwise, on the way of 
Light, all next term.) 

"The remedy is Mysticism, or Life, I'm not 
sure which. Do not leap or turn pale at the word 
Mysticism, I do not mean any religious thing, or 
any form of belief. I still burn and torture 
Christians daily. It is merely the feeling — or a 
kindred one — which underlay the mysticism of 
the wicked mystics, only I refuse to be cheated 
by the feeling into any kind of belief. They 
were convinced by it that the world was very 
good, or that the Universe was one, or that God 
existed. I don't any the more believe the world 



A MEMOIR 61 

to be good. Only I do get rid of the despair 
that it isn't — and I certainly seem to see addi- 
tional possibilities of its getting better. 

"It consists in just looking at people and 
things as themselves — neither as useful nor moral 
nor ugly nor anything else; but just as being. 
At least, that's a philosophical description of it. 
What happens is that I suddenly feel the extra- 
ordinary value and importance of everybody I 
meet, and almost everything I see. In things 
I am moved in this way especially by some 
things ; but in people by almost all people. That 
is, when the mood is on me. I roam about places 
— yesterday I did it even in Birmingham! — and 
sit in trains and see the essential glory and 
beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a 
dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway-car- 
riage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky 
wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his 
spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states 
of mind are bad. But I'm so much occupied with 
their being there at all, that I don't have time to 
think of that. I tell you that a Birmingham 
gouty Tariff Reform fifth-rate business man is 
splendid and immortal and desirable. 

"It's the same about the things of ordinary life. 
Half an hour's roaming about a street or vil- 
lage or railway-station shows so much beauty 



62 RUPERT BROOKE 

that it's impossible to be anything but wild with 
suppressed exhilaration. And it's not only beauty 
and beautiful things. In a flicker of sunlight on 
a blank wall, or a reach of muddy pavement, or 
smoke from an engine at night, there's a sudden 
significance and importance and inspiration that 
makes the breath stop with a gulp of certainty 
and happiness. It's not that the wall or the 
smoke seem important for anything, or sud- 
denly reveal any general statement, or are ra- 
tionally seen to be good or beautiful in them- 
selves, — only that for you they're perfect and 
unique. It's like being in love with a person. 
One doesn't (nowadays, and if one's clean- 
minded) think the person better or more beauti- 
ful or larger than the truth. Only one is ex- 
traordinarily excited that the person, exactly as 
he is, uniquely and splendidly just exists. It's 
a feeling, not a belief. Only it's a feeling that 
has amazing results. I suppose my occupation 
is being in love with the universe — or (for it's 
an important difference), with certain spots and 
moments and points of it. 

"I wish to God I could express myself. I have 
a vague notion that this is all very incoherent. 
But the upshot of it is that one's too happy to 
feel pessimistic; and too much impressed by the 
immense value and potentialities of everything to 



A MEMOIR 63 

believe in pessimism — for the following reason, 
and in the following sense. Every action, one 
knows (as a good Determinist), has an eternal 
effect. And every action, therefore, which leads 
on the whole to good, is 'frightfully 3 important. 
For the good mystic knows how jolly 'good' is. 
It is not a question of either getting to Utopia 
in the year 2000, or not. There'll be so much 
good then, and so much evil. And we can affect 
it. There — from the purely rational point of 
view — is the beginning and end of the whole mat- 
ter. It oughtn't to make any difference to our 
efforts whether the good in 2000 a.d. will be a lot 
greater than it is now, or a little greater, or less. 
In any case, the amount of good we can cause 
by doing something, or can subtract by not doing 
it, remains about the same. And that is all that 
ought to matter. 

"Lately, when I've been reading up the Eliza- 
bethans, and one or two other periods, I've been 
amazed more than ever at the way things change. 
Even in talking to my uncle of seventy about 
the Victorians, it comes out astoundingly. The 
whole machinery of life, and the minds of every 
class and kind of man, change beyond recogni- 
tion every generation. I don't know that 'Prog- 
ress' is certain. All I know is that change is. 
These solid solemn provincials, and old maids, 



64 RUPERT BROOKE 

and business men, and all the immovable system 
of things I see round me, will vanish like smoke. 
All this present overwhelming reality will be 
as dead and odd and fantastic as crinolines, or 
'a dish of tay.' Something will be in its place, 
inevitably. And what that something will be, 
depends on me. With such superb work to do, 
and with the wild adventure of it all, and with 
the other minutes (too many of them) given to 
the enchantment of being even for a moment 
alive in a world of real matter (not that imita- 
tion, gilt, stuff one gets in Heaven) and actual 
people, — I have no time now to be a pessimist. 
"I don't know why I have scribbled down 
these thin insane vapourings. I don't suppose 
you're still as desperate as you were when you 
wrote in June. When are you coming to Cam- 
bridge? I am going to Germany for the spring 
term. But if you can get there next term, are 
you coming out to stay at Grantchester ? I lead 
a lovely and dim and rustic life there, and have 
divine food. Hugh is going to be in London, 

and is old as the hills and withered as a 

spider, and I am the oldest Fabian left (except 

, who is senile), and I dodder about and 

smile with toothless gums on all the gay young 
sparks of the Fabian Society, to whom I am 
more than a father. 



A MEMOIR 65 

"So you might tell me if you are going to shake 
off for a day or a month the ghastly coils of 
British Family Life and of Modern Industry 
that you are wound in, and come to see the bo- 
vine existence of a farmer. 

"In the name of God and the Republic, 

Rupert." 

The next event was a journey on the Conti- 
nent at the beginning of 1911. He conceived 
romantic plans for it, as appears in the latter part 
of this letter to Geoffrey Fry, written before he 
started, to thank for a present of Mr. Bullen's 
Elizabethan Songbooks: "I read them when I 
ought to be learning German, and I writhe with 
vain passion and with envy. How did they do it? 
Was it, as we're told, because they always wrote 
to tunes? The lightness! There are moments 
when I try to write 'songs', 'where Lumpkin 
with his Giles hobnobs', but they are bumping 
rustic guffaws. I feel that sense of envious in- 
competence and a vast angry clumsiness that 
hippopotamuses at the Zoo must feel when you 
stand before them with your clouded cane and 
take snuff. They're occasionally — the song- 
books, not the hippopotamuses — so like the An- 
thology, and oh! I can see why Headlam loved 
them. 



66 RUPERT BROOKE 

"I may see you yet in England. For I don't 
go till January 8 or so. But when I do go, aha! 
England will never see me more. I shall grow 
my red whiskers and take to Art. In a few years 
you may come and stay with me in my villa at 
Sybaris, or my palace near Smyrna, or my tent 
at Kandahar, or my yacht off the Cyclades. But 
you will be a respectable lawyer. You will wag- 
gle your pince-nez and lecture me on my harem. 
Then a large one-eyed negro Eunuch will come 
and tie you up and pitch you into the sea. And 
I shall continue to paint sea-scapes in scarlet and 
umber." 

These dreams were not realised. He began his 
travels with three months in Munich, where he 
wrote to Mrs. Cornford in the middle of Febru- 
ary: "The worst of solitude — or the best — is, 
that one begins poking at his own soul, examin- 
ing it, cutting the soft and rotten parts away. 
And where's one to stop? Have you ever had, 
at lunch or dinner, an over-ripe pear or apple, 
and, determined to make the best of it, gone on 
slicing off the squashy bits? You may imagine 
me, in Miinchen, at a German lunch with Life, 
discussing hard, and cutting away at the bad 
parts of the dessert. 'Oh!' says Life, courteous 
as ever, 'I'm sure you've got a bad soul there. 
Please don't go on with it! Leave it, and take 



A MEMOIR 67 

another! I'm so sorry!' But, knowing I've 
taken the last, and polite anyhow, 'Oh, no, 
please! 3 I say, scraping away. 'It's really all 
right. It's only a little gone, here and there, 
on the outside. There's plenty that's quite good. 
I'm quite enjoying it. You always have such 
delightful souls !' . . . And after a minute, when 
there's a circle of messy brown rounding my 
plate, and in the centre a rather woe-begone 
brown-white thin shapeless scrap, the centre of 
the thing, Life breaks in again, seeing my plight. 
— 'Oh, but you can't touch any of that! It's bad 
right through! I'm sure Something must have 
got in to it! Let me ring for another! There's 
sure to be some in the larder.' . . . But it won't 
do, you know. So I rather ruefully reply, 'Ye-es, 
il'm afraid it is impossible. But I won't have 
another, thanks. I don't really want one at all. 
I only took it out of mere greed, and to have 
something to do. Thank you, I've had quite 
enough — such excellent meat and pudding! I've 
done splendidly — But to go on with our con- 
versation about Literature, — you were say- 
Jin g, I think . . . ?' and so the incident's at an 
<end. 

"Dear! dear! it's very trying being so exalted 
one day and ever so desperate the next — this 
ISelf -knowledge (why did that old fool class it 



68 RUPERT BROOKE 

with Self -reverence and Self-control? They're 
rarely seen together!) But so one lives in 
Munich. 

" — And then your letter came! So many 
thanks. It made me shake with joy to know that 
Cambridge and England (as I know it) was all 
as fine as ever. That Jacques and Ka should 
be sitting in a cafe, looking just like themselves 
— oh God! what an incredibly lovely superb 
world. I fairly howled my triumph down the 
ways of this splendid city. 'Oh ! you fat, muddy- 
faced, grey, jolly Germans who despise me be- 
cause I don't know your rotten language! Oh! 
the people I know, and you don't! Oh! you poor 
things !' And they all growl at me because they 
don't know why I glory over them. But, of 
course, part of the splendour is that — if they 
only knew it — they too, these Germans, are all 
sitting in cafes and looking just like themselves. 
That knowledge sets me often dreaming in a 
vague, clerical, world-misty spirit over my soli- 
tary coffee, in one of the innumerable cafes here 
in which I spend my days. I find myself smiling 
a dim, gentle, poetic, paternal, Jehovah-like 
smile — over the ultimate excellence of humanity 
— at people of, obviously, the most frightful lives 
and reputations at other tables; who come pres- 
ently sidling towards me. My mysticism van- 



A MEMOIR 69 

ishes, and in immense terror I fly suddenly into 
the street. 

"Oh, but they're a kindly people. Every night 
I sit in a cafe near here, after the opera, and read 
the day-old Times ( ! ) and drink — prepare to 
hear the depths of debauchery into which the 
young are led in these wicked foreign cities! — 
hot milk, a large glassful. Last night I spilt 
the whole of the hot milk over myself, while I 
was trying to negotiate the Literary Supple- 
ment. You've no idea how much of one a large 
glass of hot milk will cover. I was entirely white, 
except for my scarlet face. All the people in 
] the cafe crowded round and dabbed me with 
'dirty pocket-handkerchiefs. A kindly people. 
iNor did I give in. I ordered more hot milk and 
'finished my Supplement, damp but Interna- 
tional. 

• "No! Cambridge isn't very dim and distant, 
nor Dent a pink shade. I somehow manage, 
[these days, to be aware of two places at once. I 
lused to find it wasn't worth while; and to think 
-.that the great thing was to let go completely of 
la thing when you've done with it, and turn wholly 
'and freshly to the next. 'Being able to take and 
■jto let go and to take, and knowing when to take 
land when to let go, and knowing that life's this — 
is the only way to happiness' is the burden of the 



70 RUPERT BROOKE 

Marschallin in the Rosencavalier (the rage of 
Germany just now). There's some truth in it. 
But sometimes, now, I find I can weave two ex- 
istences together and enjoy both, and be aware 
of the unique things of each. It's true that as 
I write there's an attitude of Jacques's, or a slow 
laugh of Ka's, or a moon at Grantchester, or a 
speech of Dickinson's, that I'd love, and that I'm 
missing. But there'll be other such, no doubt, in 
May and June — and what if I'd not met the 
lovable Mr. Leuba (and so differently lovable 
from an English unsuccessful journalist!) or the 
fascinating Miss Something or Other of Paris, 
or the interesting and wicked di Ravelli. or Dr. 
Wolfskell who is shy and repeats Swinburne in 
large quantities with a villainous German accent 
but otherwise knows no English, or that bearded 
man in the cafe, or the great Hegedus, or Pro- 
fessor Sametscu? . . . 

"Eh, but I have grown clerical and solemn and 
moral. That is because I've been seeing so much 
Ibsen lately. I apologise. I'm old-fashioned 
enough to admire that man vastly. I've seen five 
or six of his plays in four weeks. They always 
leave me prostrate. 

"No, I've not yet been proposed to by young 
ladies in plaid blouses, not even one at a time. 
As a matter of fact I know only one or two 



A MEMOIR 71 

such. Most of the people I see are working at 
some sensible thing like writing, music, or paint- 
ing, and are free and comradely. I made one 
or two incursions into Anglo-German Philistia, 
and came hurriedly forth. I'm damnably sorry 
for the plaid blouses (who do exist there, and are, 
at present, so much better than their mothers). 
I saw two Stirling and crying. But I'm not going 
back to rescue them. 

"But in ordinary, and nicer, ways, I meet a 
lot of jolly people. It's true, a lot, I think, what 
you say about friends ; but oh, dear people ! it is 
fun going away and making thousands of ac- 
quaintances. 

"I finish this tourist's effusion at 2 o' the morn- 
ing, sitting up in bed, with my army blanket 
round me. My feet, infinitely disconnected, and 
southward, inform me that to-night it is freez- 
ing again. The bed is covered with Elizabethan 
and German books I may or may not read ere 
I sleep. In the distance glimmers the gaunt 
white menacing Ibsenite stove that casts a gloom 
over my life. The Algerian dancing-master next 
door is, for once, quiet. I rather think the 
Dragon overhead (the Dragon = that mon- 
strous, tired-faced, screeching, pouchy creature, 
of infinite age and horror, who screams opposite 
me at dinner and talks with great crags of food 



72 RUPERT BROOKE 

projecting from her mouth; a decayed Countess, 
they say) is snoring. 

"Oh, I sometimes make a picture of Conduit 
Head, with Jacques in a corner, and Gwen on 
other cushions, and Justin on his back, and Ka 
on a footstool, and Francis smoking, and Frances 
in the chair to the right (facing the fire). . . . 
It stands out against the marble of the Luitpold 
Cafe and then fades. . . . But say it's true! 

"Even with an enormous stomach and a beard 
and in Munich. — Yours, Rupert." 

From Munich he went to join his godfather, 
Mr. Robert Whitelaw, in Florence, Jwhere he 
wrote to me at the end of April: "I led a most 
noisome life in Munich, crawling about in trams, 
and eating, and sleeping. I never thought, and 
barely ever read. I worked hard in an intermit- 
tent doleful way, but never accomplished any- 
thing. I spent two months over a poem that de- 
scribes the feelings of a fish, in the metre of 
Lt' Allegro. It was meant to be a lyric, but has 
turned into a work of 76 lines with a moral end. 
It's quite unintelligible. Beyond that I have 
written one or two severe and subtle sonnets in 
my most modern manner — descriptions of very 
poignant and complicated situations in the life 



A MEMOIR 73 

of to-day, thrilling with a false simplicity. The 
one beginning 

'I did not think you thought I knew you knew' 

has created a sensation in English-speaking cir- 
cles in Munich. 

"I have sampled and sought out German cul- 
ture. It has changed all my political views. I 
am wildly in favour of nineteen new Dread- 
noughts. German culture must never, never 
prevail! The Germans are nice, and well-mean- 
ing, and they try; but they are soft. Oh! they 
are soft! The only good things (outside music 
perhaps) are the writings of Jews who live in 
Vienna. Have you ever heard of Mr. Schnitz- 
ler's historical play? They act an abbreviated 
version which lasts from 7 to 12. I saw it. A 
Hebrew journalist's version of the Dynasts, but 
rather good. 

"Here I live in a pension surrounded by Eng- 
lish clergymen and ladies. They are all Forster 
characters. Perhaps it is his pension. 1 But to 
live among Forster characters is too bewildering. 
The 'quaint' remarks fall all round one during 
meal-times, with little soft plups like pats of 
butter. 'So strong,' they said, next to me, at the 
concert last night, of the Fifth Symphony; 'and 

^ee E. M. Forster's "A Room with a View." 



74 RUPERT BROOKE 

yet so restful, my dear! not at all what I should 
call morbid, you know!' Just now the young 
parson and his wife, married a fortnight, have 
been conversing. 'Are you ready to kick off?' 
he said. How extraordinary! What does it 
mean? I gathered it merely meant was she 
dressed for San Lorenzo. But does the Church 
talk like that nowadays? 

"So I am seeing life. But I am thirsting for 
Grantchester. I am no longer to be at The 
Orchard, but next door at The Old Vicarage, 
with a wonderful garden. I shall fly from Flor- 
ence, which is full of painstaking ugly pictures. 
But before I go I've got to settle the question, 
'Shall I lay a handful of roses on Mrs. Brown- 
ing's grave? and, if so, how many?' These liter- 
ary problems are dreadful. And the English 
Cemetery is so near!" 

"It's very late," he wrote one evening to the 
Raverats. "The stars over Fiesole are wonder- 
ful; and there are quiet cypresses and a straight 
white wall opposite. I renounce. England; 
though at present I've the senile affection of a 
godfather for it. I think of it, over there (be- 
yond even Fiesole) — Gwen and Jacques and Ka 
and Frances and Justin and Dudley, and Dr. 
Verrall and the Master, and Lord Esher and Mr. 
Balfour. Good-night, children." 



A MEMOIR 75 



IV 



The Old Vicarage, which was his home in 1911, 
is a long, low, ramshackle, tumble-down one- 
storied house, with attics in a high roof, and a 
verandah. It has a profuse, overgrown, sweet- 
smelling, 'most individual and bewildering' gar- 
den, with random trees and long grass, and here 
and there odd relics of the eighteenth century, a 
sundial sticking out from the dried-up basin of 
a round pond, and an imitation ruin in a corner. 
Towards the end of the year it is a little mel- 
ancholy. "The garden," he wrote in September, 
"is immeasurably autumnal, sad, mysterious, au- 
gust. I walk in it feeling like a fly crawling on 
the score of the Fifth Symphony"; and in De- 
cember he called it a House of Usher. But in 
summer it's a paradise of scent and colour. 
"You'll find me quite wild with reading and the 
country," he wrote in an invitation. "Come pre- 
pared for bathing, and clad in primitive clothes. 
Bring books also: one talks eight hours, reads 
eight, and sleeps eight." 

Here is a morning of about this time, in a let- 
ter to Miss Katherine Cox: "I worked till 1, 
and then ran nearly to Haslingfleld and back 
before lunch, thinking over the next bits. There 



76 RUPERT BROOKE 

was such clearness and frosty sun. Some men 
under a haystack, eating their lunch, shouted 
how fine a day it was. I shouted back it was 
very cold; and ran on. They roared with laugh- 
ter and shouted after me that with that fine crop 
of hair I oughtn't to be cold. ... It was wonder- 
ful and very clean out there. I thought of all 
you Londoners, dirty old drivellers I Now I'm 
come in to rehearse my nigger part [as a super 
in the Magic Flute] and to work. I've realised 
that taking part in theatrical performances is 
the only thing worth doing. And it's so very 
nice being an intelligent subordinate. I'm a very 
good subordinate — it's such a test. I'm thought 
not to dance well : but my intelligence and devo- 
tion have brought me rapidly to the front. I 
am now the most important of 7 negroes!" 

He was now working at the first draft of his 
dissertation on John Webster, which he sent in 
at the end of the year. "I've wallowed in Web- 
ster-Texts all day," he wrote in September. "If 
only I didn't want, at the same time, to be read- 
ing everything else in the world, I should be in- 
finitely happy." He didn't get the Fellowship 
till next year. 

He was also preparing the book of Poems 
which Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson published in 
December. It had a mixed reception, both from 



A MEMOIR 77 

his friends and from the critics. I was lucky 
enough to take it in a way which pleased him; 
and he rewarded me with the following letter, 
which is too informing to be left out, though I 
would rather it fell to someone else to print it: 
"Your letter gave me great joy. I horribly feel 
that degrading ecstasy that I have always de- 
spised in parents whose shapeless offspring are 
praised for beauty. People are queer about my 
poems. Some that I know very well and have 
great sympathie with, don't like them. Some 
people seem to like them. Some like only the 
early ones — them considerably, but the others 
not at all. These rather sadden me. I hobnob 
vaguely with them over the promising verses of 
a young poet, called Rupert Brooke, who died 
in 1908. But I'm so much more concerned 
with the living, who doesn't interest them. 
God! it's so cheering to find someone who likes 
the modern stuff, and appreciates what one's at. 
You can't think how your remarks and liking 
thrilled me. You seemed, both in your classing 
them and when you got to details, to agree so 
closely with what I felt about them (only, of 
course, I often feel doubtful about their rela- 
tive value to other poetry) that I knew you 
understood what they meant. It sounds a poor 
compliment — or else a queer conceitedness — to 



78 RUPERT BROOKE 

remark on your understanding them; but it's 
really been rather a shock to me— and made me 
momentarily hopeless — that so many intelligent 
and well-tasted people didn't seem to have any 
idea what I was driving at, in any poem of the 
last few years. It opened my eyes to the fact 
that people who like poetry are barely more 
common than people who like pictures. 

"I'm (of course) unrepentant about the 'un- 
pleasant' poems. 1 I don't claim great merit for 
the Channel Passage: but the point of it was (or 
should have been!) 'serious.' There are com- 
mon and sordid things — situations or details — 
that may suddenly bring all tragedy, or at least 
the brutality of actual emotions, to you. I rather 
grasp relievedly at them, after I've beaten vain 
hands in the rosy mists of poets' experiences. 
Lear's button, and Hilda Lessways turning the 
gas suddenly on, and — but you know more of 
them than I. Shakespeare's not unsympathetic. 
'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.' 
And the emotions of a sea-sick lover seem to me 
at least as poignant as those of the hero who has 
'brain-fever.' 

"Mrs. Cornford tried to engage me in a con- 
troversy over the book — she and her school. They 

1 1 had expressed an apologetic preference for poems that I 
could read at meals. 



A MEMOIR 79 

are known as the Heart-criers, because they be- 
lieve all poetry ought to be short, simple, naive, 
and a cry from the heart; the sort of thing an 
inspired only child might utter if it was in the 
habit of posing to its elders. They object to 
my poetry as unreal, affected, complex, 'literary,' 
and full of long words. I'm re-writing English 
literature on their lines. Do you think this is 
a fair rendering of Shakespeare's first twenty 
sonnets, if Mrs. Cornford had had the doing of 
them? 

Triolet 

If you would only have a son, 

William, the day would be a glad one. 

It would be nice for everyone, 

If you would only have a son. 

And, William, what would you have done 
If Lady Pembroke hadn't had one? 

If you would only have a son, 

William, the day would be a glad one ! 

It seems to me to have got the kernel of the situa- 
tion, and stripped away all unnecessary verbiage 
or conscious adornment." 

The verdicts of the newspapers varied from 
that of the Saturday Review, which "definitely 
told Mr. Rupert Brooke to 'mar no more trees 
with writing love-songs in their barks,' " to that 



80 RUPERT BROOKE 

of the Daily Chronicle, which prophesied, by the 
mouth of Edward Thomas, that he would be a 
poet, and not a little one. It may be said that in 
general the book was received with a good deal 
of interest, and hailed as at least promising. 
Many of the critics seemed so struck with the 
'unpleasant' poems (seven, at most, out of fifty) 
that they could hardly notice the others. This 
showed, perhaps, a wrong sense of proportion; 
but the author's own point of view about them 
is certainly a matter of interest, and though the 
purpose of this memoir is not critical, it may be 
worth while here to put together some of its 
factors, besides those which appear from the let- 
ter I have just quoted. It is, of course, absurdly 
untrue that, as has been said, he felt he ought to 
make up for his personal beauty by being ugly 
in his poetry. To begin with, ugliness had a 
quite unaffected attraction for him; he thought 
it just as interesting as anything else; he didn't 
like it — he loathed it — but he liked thinking about 
it. 'The poetical character,' as Keats said, 'lives 
in gusto.' Then he still had at this age (24) a 
good deal of what soon afterwards faded com- 
pletely away — the bravado, the feeling that it 
was fun to shock and astonish the respectable, 
which came out in his school letters. Again, he 
was incensed by the usual attitude of criticism — 



A MEMOIR 81 

in his view, either stupid or hypocritical — to- 
wards 'coarseness' in literature. "Indeed," he 
wrote early this year in a review, "the Elizabeth- 
ans were refined. Their stories were shocking, 
their thoughts nasty, their language indelicate. 
It is absurd to want them otherwise. It is in- 
tolerable that these critics should shake the peda- 
gogic finger of amazed reproval at them. 

Such people do not understand that 

the vitality of the Elizabethan Drama is insepa- 
rable from [its coarseness]. Their wail that its 
realism is mingled with indecency is more than 
. once repeated. True literary realism, they think, 
I is a fearless reproduction of what real living men 
say when there is a clergyman in the room." The 
| feeling here expressed urged him to make a dem- 
Jonstration; it dignified the boyish impulse into 
la duty. 

To conclude this subject I will quote a letter 
to his publisher about the sonnet Libido, to which 
jthe original title Lust is now restored: "My 
jown feeling is that to remove it would be to over- 
balance the book still more in the direction of un- 
I important prettiness. There's plenty of that 
'sort of wash in the other pages for the readers 
jwho like it. They needn't read the parts which 
are new and serious. About a lot of the book I 
occasionally feel that like Ophelia I've turned 



82 RUPERT BROOKE 

'thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, to fa- 
vour and to prettiness.' So I'm extra keen about 
the places where I think that thought and pas- 
sion are, however clumsily, not so transmuted. 
This was one of them. It seemed to have quali- 
ties of reality and novelty that made up for the 
clumsiness. ... I should like it to stand, as a 
representative in the book of abortive poetry 
against literary verse; and because I can't see 
any aesthetic ground against it which would not 
damn three-quarters of the rest of the book too ; 
or any moral ground at all." 

During all this time he was working up to a 
rather serious illness. As a child and as a boy he 
had been delicate, but at Cambridge his health 
had greatly improved, and all the time he was 
there he never had to go to a doctor. Now, 
however, he left his open-air life and came to 
London for work on Webster. "He lived," his 
Mother tells me, "in wretched rooms in Charlotte 
Street, spending all day at the British Museum, 
going round to his friends in the evening and 
sitting up most of the night. He then went to 
Grantchester to finish his dissertation, and from 
his brother's account scarcely went to bed at all 
for a week, several times working all night. He 
came home for Christmas quite tired out." The 



A MEMOIR 83 

letter to me which I last quoted, written at Rug- 
by on the 22nd of December, ends with this: 
"I'm sorry I never saw you again. The last part 
of November and the first of December I spent 
in writing my dissertation at Grantchester. 

I couldn't do it at all well. I came to 

London in a dilapidated condition for a day or 
two after it was over. Now I'm here over Christ- 
mas. About the 27th I go to Lulworth with a 
reading-party for a fortnight. Then to the 
South of France, then Germany . . . and the 
future's mere mist. I want to stay out of Eng- 
land for some time. ( 1 ) I don't like it. (2)1 
want to work — a play, and so on. (3) I'm rather 
tired and dejected. 

"So I probably shan't be in London for some 
time. If I am, I'll let you know. I'm going to 
try to do scraps — reviewing, etc. — in my spare 
time for the immediate future. I suppose you 
don't edit a magazine? I might review Eliza- 
bethan books at some length for the Admiralty 
Gazette or T.A.T. (Tattle amongst Tars), or 
whatever journal you officially produce? At 
least I hope you'll issue an order to include my 
poems in the library of all submarines." 

His next letter is of February 25th, 1912, 
from Rugby: "I went to Lulworth after Christ- 
mas for a reading party. There I collapsed sud- 



84 RUPERT BROOKE 

denly into a foodless and sleepless Hell. God! 
how one can suffer from what my amiable spe- 
cialist described as a 'nervous breakdown.' (He 
reported that I had got into a 'seriously intro- 
spective condition'! and — more tangibly — that 
my weight had gone down a stone or two.) I 
tottered, being too tired for suicide, to Cannes, 

not because I like the b place, but because 

my mother happened to be there. I flapped 
slowly towards the surface there; and rose a lit- 
tle more at Munich. I have come here for a 
month or two to complete it. After that I shall 
be allowed (and, by Phoebus, able, I hope) to 
do some work. My cure consists in perpetual 
over-eating and over-sleeping, no exercise, and 
no thought. Rather a nice existence, but oh 
God! weary." 

In March he went for a walk in Sussex with 
James Strachey, and sent Miss Cox a sensational 
account, dated from 'The Mermaid Club, Rye,' 
of an unsuccessful attempt to visit a great man 
whose acquaintance he had made at Cambridge. 
"I read the 'Way of All Flesh' and talk to 
James. James and I have been out this evening 
to call on Mr. Henry James at 9.0. We found — 
at length — the house. It was immensely rich, 
and brilliantly lighted at every window on the 



A MEMOIR 85 

ground floor. The upper floors were deserted: 
one black window open. The house is straight 
on the street. We nearly fainted with fear of 
a company. At length I pressed the Bell of the 
Great Door — there was a smaller door further 
along, the servants' door we were told. No an- 
swer. I pressed again. At length a slow drag- 
ging step was heard within. It stopped inside 
the door. We shuffled. Then, very slowly, very 
loudly, immense numbers of chains and bolts 
were drawn within. There was a pause again. 
Further rattling within. Then the steps seemed 
to be heard retreating. There was silence. We 
waited in a wild agonising stupefaction. The 
house was dead silent. At length there was a 
shuffling noise from the servants' door. We 
J thought someone was about to emerge from there 
I to greet us. We slid down towards it — nothing 
happened. We drew back and observed the 
house. A low whistle came from it. Then noth- 
ing for two minutes. Suddenly a shadow passed 
\ quickly across the light in the window nearest 
\ the door. Again nothing happened. James and 
j I, sick with surmise, stole down the street. We 
I thought we heard another whistle, as we de- 
j arted. We came back here shaking — we didn't 
know at what. 

"If the evening paper, as you get this, tells of 



86 RUPERT BROOKE 

the murder of Mr. Henry James — you'll know." 
By this time he was quite well again. He went 
to Germany in April, and stayed there for two 
or three months, mostly with Dudley Ward in 
Berlin, where he wrote The Old Vicarage, 
Grantchester * ( 'this hurried stuff,' he called it 
when he sent it me). "I read Elizabethans for 
2-3 hours a day, quite happily," he wrote to his 
Mother. "Other work I haven't tried much. I 
started a short play, and worked at it for two or 
three hours. I paid the penalty by not getting 
to sleep till 5 next morning." The play was a 
one-act melodrama called Lithuania, founded on 
the well-known anecdote of a son coming back 
with a fortune, after years of absence in Amer- 
ica, to his peasant-family, who kill him for his 
money and then find out who he was. (It was 
acted in the spring of lGlG^y Miss Lilian 
McCarthy, Miss Clare Greet, Leon M. Lion, 
John Drinkwater, and others, at a charity mat- 
inee at His Majesty's, together with Gordon 
Bottomley's King Lears Wife and Wilfrid Gib- 
son's Hoops; and was thought to show much 
promise of dramatic power.) 

He came home from Germany as well as ever, 
to spend the rest of the summer at Grantchester. 

1 This poem was first published in the King's magazine Basileon, 
The MS. is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. 



A MEMOIR 87 

I must here touch upon a change in his out- 
look, a development of his character, which, as 
I think, took form during this year from the 
germs which may be seen in his earlier letters, 
already quoted, to Mr. Cotterill and to Ben Keel- 
ing. Perhaps it was the result of the 'introspec- 
tion' which contributed to his illness, and to 
which his illness in its turn gave opportunity. 
To put it briefly and bluntly, he had discovered 
that goodness was the most important thing in 
life — 'that immortal beauty and goodness,' as he 
wrote much later, 'that radiance, to love which 
is to feel one has safely hold of eternal things.' 
Since he grew up he had never held (and did not 
now acquire) any definite, still less any ready- 
made, form of religious belief ; his ideals had been 
mainly intellectual; and if he had been asked to 
define goodness, he would probably have said 
that it meant having true opinions about ethics. 
Now he found that it was even more a matter of 
the heart and of the will; and he did not shrink 
from avowing his changed view to his old com- 
rades in the life of the mind, some of whom per- | 
haps found it a little discon cert ing, a little ridicu- 
lous. «^ 

Henceforward the only thing that he cared for 
■ — or rather felt he ought to care for — in a man, 
was the possession of goodness; its absence, the 



i . 



88 RUPERT BROOKE 

one thing that he hated, sometimes with fierce- 
ness. He never codified his morals, never made 
laws for the conduct of others, or for his own; it 
was the spirit, the passion, that counted with him. 
"That is the final rule of life, the best one ever 
made," he wrote next year from the Pacific, — 
" 'Whoso shall offend one of these little ones' — 
remembering that all the eight hundred millions 
on earth, except oneself, are the little ones." 

In the autumn of this year he began coming to 
London oftener and for longer visits, usually 
staying at my rooms in Gray's Inn; going to 
plays and music halls, seeing pictures, and mak- 
ing numbers of new acquaintances and friends. 
Henry James, W. B. Yeats and John Masefield 
he knew already ; and he made friends about this 
time with Edmund Gosse, Walter de la Mare, 
Wilfrid Gibson, John Drinkwater, W. H. Da- 
vies, and many others. 

There was a general feeling among the 
younger poets that modern English poetry was 
very good, and sadly neglected by readers. 
Rupert announced one evening, sitting half-un- 
dressed on his bed, that he had conceived a bril- 
liant scheme. He would write a book of poetry, 
and publish it as a selection from the works of 
twelve different writers, six men and six women, 



A MEMOIR 89 

all with the most convincing pseudonyms. That, 
he thought, must make them sit up. It occurred 
to me that as we both believed there were at least 
twelve flesh-and-blood poets whose work, if prop- 
erly thrust under the public's nose, had a good 
chance of producing the effect he desired, it 
would be simpler to use the material which was 
ready to hand. Next day (September 20th it 
was) we lunched in my rooms with Gibson and 
Drinkwater, and Harold Monro and Arundel 
del Re (editor and sub-editor of the then Poetry 
Review, since re-named Poetry and Drama) , and 
started the plan of the book which was published 
in December under the name of Georgian Poetry, 
1911-1912. 

This was our great excitement for the rest of 
the year. Rupert went to stay with Ward in 
Berlin for November, and kept sending sugges- 
tions for promoting the sale of the book. (Years 
before, a cynical young friend of ours at King's 
had told me that though 'Rupert's public form 
was the youthful poet, the real foundation of his 
character was a hard business faculty.') "I for- 
get all my other ideas," he wrote, after making 
some very practical proposals, "but they each 
sold some 25 copies. I have a hazy vision of in- 
credible reclame. You ought to have an immense 
map of England (vide 'Tono-Bungay') and plan 



90 RUPERT BROOKE 

campaigns with its aid. And literary charts, each 
district mapped out, and a fortress secured. 
John Buchan to fill a page of the Spectator: 
Filson Young in the P.M.G. (we shall be seven- 
teen Things that Matter in italics?), etc., etc. 
You'll be able to found a hostel for poor Geor- 
gians on the profits." Some of his ideas were too 
vast, but others were acted on; and though de- 
lays of printing and binding kept the book back 
till a few days before Christmas, frustrating our 
calculation on huge sales to present-givers, its 
success outran our wildest hopes. 

He spent most of the spring of 1913 in Lon- 
don, enjoying himself in many directions. He 
went again and again to the Russian Ballet, 
which he loved ("They, if anything can, redeem 
our civilisation," he had written in December. 
"I'd give everything to be a ballet-designer") ; 
and he conceived a passion for the Hippodrome 
Revue, Hullo, Ragtime! which he saw ten times. 
He had always been on occasion a great fitter-in 
of things and people, and vast networks of his 
minute arrangements survive on postcards, 
though without the finishing strands put in by 
telephone. He got to know more and more peo- 
ple, including the Asquith family and George 
Wyndham, with whom he spent a Sunday at 
Clouds. He had no ambition for the career of a 



A MEMOIR 91 

'young man about town' ; but he felt he might let 
himself go for the moment, as he would be start- 
ing for America before he could get too much 
involved. 

He got his Fellowship on March 8th. "It's 
very good of you to congratulate me," he wrote 
to Geoffrey Fry. "You can't think how I de- 
spise you mere civilians, now. Jetzt bin ich Pro- 
fessor. A grey look of learning has already set- 
tled on my face. And I wear spectacles." Next 
week he went to King's to be admitted, or, as he 
called it, 'churched.' "I dined solemnly," he told 
Mrs. Cornford, "with very old white-haired men, 
at one end of a vast dimly-lit hall, and afterwards 
drank port somnolently in the Common Room, 
with the College silver, and 17th Century por- 
traits, and a 16th Century fireplace, and 15th 
Century ideas. The perfect Don, I . . . " 

The only other break in the London life was a 
visit to Rugby towards the end of March, when 
he wrote a rapturous spring-letter to Miss Cath- 
leen Nesbitt. "But oh! but oh! such a day! 
'Spring came complete with a leap in a day,' said 
the wisest and nicest man in Warwickshire — my 
godfather, 1 an aged scholar, infinitely learned in 
Greek, Latin, English, and Life. He said it 
was a quotation from Browning. It certainly 

J Mr. Whitelaw. 



92 RUPERT BROOKE 

fitted. I took him a walk. The air had changed 
all in a night, and had that soft caressingness, 
and yet made you want to jump and gambol. 
Alacer, and not acer, was, we agreed, the epithet 
for the air. Oh ! it's mad to be in London with 
the world like this. I can't tell you of it. The 
excitement and music of the birds,, the delicious 
madness of the air, the blue haze in the distance, 
the straining of the hedges, the green mist of 
shoots about the trees — oh, it wasn't in these de- 
tails — it was beyond and round them— something 
that included them. It's the sort of day that 
brought back to me what I've had so rarely for 
the last two years — that tearing hunger to do 
and do and do things. I want to walk 1000 miles, 
and write 1000 plays, and sing 1000 poems, and 
drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 1000 girls, and 

— oh, a million things! The spring 

makes me almost ill with excitement. I go round 
corners on the roads shivering and nearly crying 
with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some 
playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten 
one." 



On May 22nd he started for New York on a 
year's travels. "You won't see me again till I'm 



A MEMOIR 93 

a bold, bad, bearded broncho-buster in a red shirt 
and riding-breeches," he wrote to Miss Sybil Pye. 
His plans were vague, and at that time he ex- 
pected to be back by the end of 1913. He had 
written to his mother in February, to explain: 
"I think, now my physical health is quite all right, 
I shall go off to America or somewhere. I feel 
just as I did in the autumn, that it's no good 
going on in England It is only wast- 
ing time to go on without doing proper work. 
I think of going off to California or somewhere, 
and doing some kind of work, or tramping. I 
shall take what money I have, and if they don't 
give me a fellowship, I can capitalise <£200 or 
so, and that'll last me for as long as I want to be 
abroad. I have no fear about being able to make 
a living now, for there are so many papers that'll 
print anything by me whenever I like." 

"We may meet again in this world," he wrote 
to the Raver at s, "I brown and bearded, you mere 
red round farmers. When that'll be, I know not. 
Perhaps in six months. Perhaps in six years. 
Or we may only find each other in a whiter world, 
nighty-clad, harped, winged, celibate. 

Shall we go walks along the hills of Heaven, 
Rucksack on back and aureole in pocket, 
And stay in Paradisal pubs, and drink 



94 RUPERT BROOKE 

Immortal toasts in old ambrosia, 

Fry wings in nectar on the glassy sea, 

And build the fire with twigs of amaranth?" 

Here is his farewell to England, in a letter to 
a friend from the s.s. Cedric: "I arrived solitary 
on the boat. After it started I went to the office, 
more to show that I existed than in the dimmest 
hope of getting anything — and there was stuck 
up a list called 'Unclaimed Mail.' (I thought it 
sounded as if a lot of the Knights who had prom- 
ised to equip themselves for the Quest of the 
Holy Grail had missed the train, or married a 
wife, or overslept, or something.) And at the 
top of the list 'Mr. Rupert Brooke.' ...... 

" — day. Time is no more. I have been a 
million years on this boat. I don't know if it's 
this month or last or next. Sometimes, remotely, 
in a past existence, I was on land. But this is 
another existence. ... I have my joys. Today 
I ate clam-chowder. That's romance, isn't it ? I 
ordered it quite recklessly. I didn't know what it 
was. I only knew that anything called clam- 
chowder must be strange beyond words. 

If you were like clam-chowder 

And I were like the spoon, 
And the band were playing louder 

And a little more in tune, 



A MEMOIR 95 

I'd stir you till I spilled you, 
Or kiss you till I killed you, 
If you were like clam-chowder 
And I were like the spoon. 

(But you don't know Swinburne.) 'Clam-chow- 
der,' my God! what am I coming to? . . . 

"I haven't told you much about my voyage, 
have I ? There's not much to tell. I felt, before 
I got your letter, a trifle lonely at Liverpool. 
Everybody else seemed to have people to see 
them off. So I went back on shore and found a 
dirty little boy, who was unoccupied, and said 
his name was William. 'Will you wave to me if 
I give you sixpence, William?' I said. 'Why 
yes,' said William. So I gave him sixpence, and 
went back on board. And when the time came he 
leaned over his railing on the landing-stage, and 
waved. And now and then he shouted indistinct 
messages in a shrill voice. And as we slid away, 
the last object I looked at was a small dot waving 
a white handkerchief, or nearly white, faithfully. 
So I got my sixpenn'orth and my farewell — Dear 
William!" 

For his travels in America and Canada, his 
letters to the Westminster Gazette, since repub- 
lished, must be allowed in the main to speak ; but 
these may be supplemented by scraps of his let- 



96 RUPERT BROOKE 

ters to his mother and his friends. "America 
hasn't changed me much yet," he wrote from 
New York. "I've got the adorablest little touch 
of an American accent, and I'm a bit thinner." 
He wasn't very happy at first. "When I'm 
alone," he wrote to me on June 29th from the 
Montreal Express, "I sink into a kind of mental 
stupor which may last for months. I shan't be 
really right till I get back to you all." And again 
from Ottawa, ten days later, "I don't get very 
miserable, or go to pieces (save for occasional 
bursts of home-sickness just before meals) ; but 
my whole level of life descends to an incredible 
muddy flatness. I do no reading, no thinking, 
no writing. And very often I don't see many 
things. The real hell of it is that I get so numb 
that my brain and senses don't record fine or clear 
impressions. So the time is nearly all waste. 
I'm very much ashamed of it all. For I've always 
beforehand a picture of myself dancing through 
foreign cities, drinking in novelty, hurling off let- 
ters to the W.G.j breaking into song and son- 
net, dashing off plays and novels. . . . Lord, 

Lord! 

"American 'hospitality' means that with the 
nice ones you can be at once on happy and inti- 
mate terms. Oh dear, the tears quite literally 
well up into my eyes when I think of a group 



A MEMOIR 97 

of young Harvard people I tumbled into — at 
Harvard. They had the charm and freshness 
and capacity for instantly creating a relation of 
happy and warm friendliness that, for instance, 

Denis * has. It's a nice thing 

"You, at home, have no conception how you're 
all getting a sanctity and halo about you in my 
mind. I dwell so much and so sentimentally on 
all the dear dead days that I am beginning to see 
no faults and all virtues in all of you. You, my 
dear, appear perfection in every part. Your 
passion for anagrams is a lovable and deeply 
intellectual taste. Your acquaintance with [a 
bete noire of his] a beautiful thing. Your lack 
of sympathy with the Labour Party turns to a 
noble and picturesque Toryism. Even your 
preference for gilded over comfortable chairs 
loses something of its ugliness in my heart. Of 

you and Norton and Duncan and and even 

I think incessantly, devotedly, and tearfully. 

Even of figures who, to be frank, have hovered 
but dimly on the outskirts of my consciousness, 
I am continually and fragrantly memorial. 

I make up little minor, pitiful songs, 

the burden of which is that I have a folk-longing 
to get back from all this Imperial luxury to the 
simplicity of the little places and quiet folks I 

1 Denis Browne, of whom more hereafter. 



98 RUPERT BROOKE 

knew and loved. One very beautiful one has the 
chorus — 

Would God I were eating plover's eggs, 

And drinking dry champagne, 
With the Bernard Shaws, Mr. and Mrs. Masefield, Lady 
Horner, Neil Primrose, Raleigh, the Right Honourable 
Augustine Birrell, Eddie, six or seven Asquiths, and 
Felicity Tree, 

In Downing Street again." 

His next letter was from Toronto, a fortnight 
later: "I've found here an Arts and Letters Club 
of poets, painters, journalists, etc., where they'd 
heard of me, and read G. P., 1 and, oh Eddie, one 
fellow actually possessed my 'Poems.' Awful 
Triumph. Every now and then one comes up 
and presses my hand and says, 'Wal Sir, you 
cannot know what a memorable Day in my life 
this is.' Then I do my pet boyish-modesty stunt 
and go pink all over; and everyone thinks it too 
delightful. One man said to me, 'Mr. Brooks' 
(my Canadian name), 'Sir, I may tell you that 
in my opinion you have Mr. Noyes skinned.' 
That means I'm better than him : a great compli- 
ment. But they're really quite an up-to-date 
lot; and very cheery and pleasant. I go to- 
morrow to the desert and the wilds." 

1 Georgian Poetry. 



A MEMOIR 99 

The desert and the wilds suited him much 
better than the cities. "Today," he wrote to 
Miss Nesbit on the 3rd of August from Lake 
George, about 70 miles from Winnipeg, "I'm 
26 years old — and I've done so little. I'm very 
much ashamed. By God, I am going to make 
things hum though — but that's all so far away. 
I'm lying quite naked on a beach of golden sand, 
6 miles away from the hunting-lodge, the other 
man near by, a gun between us in case bears ap- 
pear, the boat pulled up on the shore, the lake 
very blue and ripply, and the sun rather strong. 

We caught two pike on the way out, 

which lie picturesquely in the bows of the boat. 
Along the red-gold beach are the tracks of vari- 
ous wild animals, mostly jumping-deer and cari- 
bou. One red-deer we saw as we came round 
the corner, lolloping along the beach, stopping 
and snuffling the wind, and then going on again. 
Very lovely. We were up-wind and it didn't 
see us, and the meat wasn't needed, so we didn't 
shoot at it (I'm glad, I'm no 'sportsman') . We 
bathed off the beach, and then lit a fire of birch 
and spruce, and fried eggs, and ate cold caribou- 
heart, and made tea, and had, oh! blueberry pie. 
Cooking and eating a meal naked is the most 
solemnly primitive thing one can do; and — this 
is the one thing which will make you realise that 



100 RUPERT BROOKE 

I'm living far the most wonderfully and incred- 
ibly romantic life you ever heard of, and infin- 
itely superior to your miserable crawling London 
existence — the place we landed at is an Indian 
Camp. At any moment a flotilla of birchbark 
canoes may sweep round the corner, crowded 
with Indians, braves and squaws and papooses — 
and not those lonely half-breeds and stray 
Indians that speak English, mind you, but the 
Real Thing! Shades of Fenimore Cooper!" 

But he was quite able to cope with civilisation 
when he got back to it. The next letter is ten 
days later, from Edmonton: "I find I'm becom- 
ing very thick-skinned and bold, and the com- 
plete journalist. I've just been interviewed by 
a reporter. I fairly crushed him. I just put 
my cigar in the corner of my mouth, and undid 
my coat -buttons, and put my thumbs under my 
armpits, and spat, and said, 'Say, Kid, this is 
some town.' He asked me a lot of questions to 
which I didn't know the answers, so I 
lied 

"Also I am become very good at bearding peo- 
ple. I just enter railway offices and demand 
free passes as a journalist, and stamp into im- 
mense newspaper buildings and say I want to 
talk for an hour to the Chief Editor, and I can 
lean across the counter with a cigarette and dis- 



A MEMOIR 101 

cuss the Heart with the young lady who sells 
cigars, newspapers, and stamps. I believe I 
could do a deal in Real Estate, in the bar, over 
a John Collins, with a clean-shaven Yankee with 
a tremulous eyelid and a moist lower lip. In 
fact, I am a Man." 

He stayed some days at Vancouver, where he 
wrote his mother a letter which gives me occasion 
to stand in a very white sheet. "I'm glad you 
like the Westminster articles. They're not 
always very well written, but I think they're 
the sort of stuff that ought to interest an intelli- 
gent W.G. reader more than the ordinary travel 
stuff one sees. I hope they won't annoy people 
over this side. Canadians and Americans are 
so touchy. But it's absurd to ladle out indis- 
criminate praise, as most people do. I heard 
from Eddie about the proofs. I was very sad 
at one thing. In my first or second article I had 
made an American say 'You bet your' — which is 
good American slang. Eddie thought a word 
was left out and inserted 'boots,' I only hope 
the W.G. omitted it. I suppose it'll be printed 
by now. If not, 'phone the W.G. or write — 
Rut it must be too late. Alas! Alas! 

"Vancouver is a queer place, rather different 
from the rest of Canada. More oriental. The 
country and harbour are rather beautiful, with 



102 RUPERT BROOKE 

great violet mountains all round, snow-peaks in 
the distance. They interviewed me and put (as 
usual) a quite inaccurate report of it in the 
paper, saying I'd come here to investigate the 
Japanese question. In consequence about five 
people rang me up every morning at 8 o'clock 
(British Columbians get up an hour earlier than 
I) to say they wanted to wait on me and give me 
their views. Out here they always have tele- 
phones in the bedrooms. One old sea-captain 
came miles to tell me that the Japanese — and 
every other — trouble was due to the fact that 
British Columbia had neglected the teaching of 
the Gospels on the land question. He wasn't 
so far out in some respects." 

He sailed for Hawaii from San Francisco, 
where he was warmly welcomed at Berkeley Uni- 
versity by Professor Gayly and Professor Wells, 
and made many friends among the undergradu- 
ates. "California," he wrote to me on the 1st 
of October, "is nice, and the Calif ornians a 
friendly bunch. There's a sort of goldenness 
about 'Frisco and the neighbourhood. It hangs 
in the air, and about the people. Everyone is 
very cheery and cordial and simple. They are 
rather a nation apart, different from the rest of 
the States. Much more like the English. As 
everywhere in this extraordinary country, I am 



A MEMOIR 103 

welcomed with open arms when I say I know 
Masefield and Goldie ! * It's very queer. I 
can't for the life of me help moving about like a 
metropolitan among rustics, or an Athenian in 
Thrace. Their wide-mouthed awe at England 
is so touching — they really are a colony of ours 
still. That they should be speaking to a man 
who knows Lowes Dickinson, has met Gals- 
worthy, who once saw Belloc plain! . . . What 
should we feel if we could speak with an habitue 
of the theatre at Athens, Fifth Century, or with 
Mine Host of the Mermaid? All that they have 
with me, the dears! Yet I don't know why I 
write this from California, the one place that 
has a literature and tradition of its own. 

"On Tuesday — the Pacific. I'll write thence, 
but God knows when it'll get to you." 

He wrote no letters to the Westminster from 
the South Seas, chiefly because the life there was 
too absorbing, but partly perhaps from doubt 
whether they would be used. He had got a let- 
ter from which he inferred, wrongly, that only 
one series of six letters was wanted from him. 
"Isn't it beastly?" he wrote. "I supposed I was 
going on once a week for months and years. I 
could read me once a week for ever, couldn't 
you?" But there are plenty of letters to friends. 

1 G. Lowes Dickinson. 



104 RUPERT BROOKE 

"The Pacific," he wrote from the steamer on Oc- 
tober 12th, "has been very pacific, God be 
thanked — so I've had a pleasant voyage. Three 
passionate Pacific women cast lustrous eyes to- 
wards me, but, with a dim remembrance of the 
fate of Conrad characters who succumbed to 
such advances, I evade them. I pass my hand 
wearily through my long hair, and say, 'Is not 
the soul of Maurya a glimmering wing in the 
moth-hour?' or words to that effect. The Celtic 
method is not understood in this part of the 
world." 

The first stop was at Honolulu, where he 
stayed on Waikiki beach, the scene of the sonnet 
beginning "Warm perfumes like a breath from 
vine and tree." He wrote to his mother with- 
out enthusiasm: "Honolulu itself is a dread- 
fully American place, just like any city in the 
States or Canada" ; and he found little better to 
say of the country round about than that "it 
really is tropical in character, like some of the 
gardens and places at Cannes, on an immense 
scale." 

But this is what he wrote to me about Samoa 
from the steamer taking him to Fiji: "It's all 
true about the South Seas ! I get a little tired of 
it at moments, because I am just too old for Ro- 
mance. But there it is; there it wonderfully is; 



A MEMOIR 105 

heaven on earth, the ideal life, little work, danc- 
ing and singing and eating; naked people of in- 
credible loveliness, perfect manners, and immense 
kindliness, a divine tropic climate, and intoxica- 
ting beauty of scenery. I wandered with an 'in- 
terpreter' — entirely genial and quite incapable of 
English — through Samoan villages. The last 
few days I stopped in one, where a big marriage 
feast was going on. I lived in a Samoan house 
(the coolest in the world) with a man and his 
wife, nine children ranging from a proud beauty 
of 18 to a round object of 1 year, a dog, a cat, a 
proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and 
green parrot who roved the roof and beams with a 

wicked eye, choosing a place whence to 

twice a day, with humorous precision, on my hat 
and clothes. 

"The Samoan girls have extraordinarily beau- 
tiful bodies, and walk like goddesses. They're 
a lovely brown colour, without any black Melane- 
sian admixture. Can't you imagine how shat- 
tered and fragmentary a heart I'm bearing away 
to Fiji and Tahiti? And, oh dear! I'm afraid 
they'll be just as bad. 

"And it's all true about, for instance, cocoa- 
nuts. You tramp through a strange, vast, drip- 
ping, tropical forest for hours, listening to weird 
liquid hootings from birds and demons in the 



106 RUPERT BROOKE 

branches above. Then you feel thirsty. So you 
send your boy up a great perpendicular palm. 
He runs up with utter ease and grace, cuts off a 
couple of vast nuts, and comes down and makes 
holes in them. And they're chock-full of the 
best drink in the world. Romance! Romance! 
I walked 15 miles through mud and up and down 
mountains, and swam three rivers, to get this 
boat. Rut if ever you miss me, suddenly, one 
day, from lecture-room R in King's, or from 
the Moulin d'Or at lunch, you'll know that I've 
got sick for the full moon on these little thatched 
roofs, and the palms against the morning, and 
the Samoan boys and girls diving thirty feet into 
a green sea or a deep mountain pool under a 
waterfall — and that I've gone back." 

The next place was Fiji, where he wrote to 
Edmund Gosse from Suva on November 19th. 
"I've just got into this place, from Samoa. I 
said to myself, 'Fiji is obviously the wildest place 
I can get to round here. The name, and pictures 
of the inhabitants, prove it.' And lo! a large 
English town, with two banks, several churches, 
dental surgeons, a large gaol, auctioneers, book- 
makers, two newspapers, and all the other appur- 
tenances of civilisation! But I fancy I'll be able 
to get some little boat and go off to some smaller 
wilder islands 



A MEMOIR 107 

"Perplexing country ! At home everything is 
so simple, and choice is swift, for the sensible 
man. There is only the choice between writing a 
good sonnet and making a million pounds. Who 
could hesitate? But here the choice is between 
writing a sonnet, and climbing a straight hun- 
dred-foot cocoanut palm, or diving forty feet 
from a rock into pellucid blue-green water. 
Which is the better, there? One's European 
literary soul begins to be haunted by strange 
doubts and shaken with fundamental, fan- 
tastic misgivings. I think I shall return 
home 

"Oh, it's horribly true, what you wrote, that 
one only finds in the South Seas what one brings 
there. Perhaps I could have found Romance if 
I'd brought it. Yet I do not think one could 
help but find less trouble than one brings. The 
idea of the South Seas as a place of passion and 
a Mohammedan's paradise is but a sailor's yarn. 
It is nothing near so disturbing. It's rather the 
opposite of alcohol according to the Porter's defi- 
nition: for it promotes performance but takes 
away desire. Yet I can understand Stevenson 
finding — as you put it — the Shorter Catechism 
there. One keeps realising, however unwill- 
ingly, responsibility. I noticed in myself, and 
in the other white people in Samoa, a trait that 



108 RUPERT BROOKE 

I have remarked in Schoolmasters. You know 
that sort of slightly irritated tolerance, and lack 
of irresponsibility, that mark the pedagogue? 
One feels that one's a White Man ( vide Kipling 
passim) — ludicrously. I kept thinking I was in 
the Sixth at Rugby again. These dear good 
people, with their laughter and friendliness and 
crowns of flowers — one feels that one must pro- 
tect them. If one was having an evening out 
with Falstaff and Bardolph themselves, and a 
small delightful child came up with 'Please I'm 
lost and I want to get home,' wouldn't one have 
to leave good fellowship and spend the evening 
in mean streets tracking its abode? That's, I 
fancy, how the white man feels in these forgotten 
— and dissolving — pieces of heaven. And that 
perhaps is what Stevenson felt — I don't know 
enough about him. His memory is sweet there, 
in Samoa: especially among the natives. The 
white men, mostly traders, who remain from his 
time, have — for such people — very warm recol- 
lections of his personality: but — with a touch 
of pathos — avow themselves unable to see any 
merit in his work. Such stuff as the Wrong 
Box they frankly can't understand a grown man 
writing ... I went up the steep hill above 
Vailima, where the grave is. It's a high and 
lonely spot. I took a Samoan of about 20 to 



A MEMOIR 109 

guide me. He was much impressed by Steven- 
son's fame. 'That fellow,' he said, 'I think every 
fellow in world know him.' Then he looked 
perplexed. 'But my father say,' he went on, 
'Stevenson no big man — small man.' That a 
slight man of medium height should be so famous, 
puzzled him altogether. If he had been seven feet 

high, now! Fame is a curious thing 

Oh, do forgive the envelope. My own, in this 
awful climate, are all fast stuck, though never 
filled, like an English churchman's mind. And 
I'm reduced to these fantastic affairs." 

Other letters add touches to his picture. To 
me he wrote: "Suva is a queer place; much 
civilised; full of English people who observe the 
Rules of Etiquette, and call on third Thursdays, 
and do not speak to the 'natives.' Fiji's not so 
attractive as Samoa, but more macabre. Across 
the bay are ranges of inky, sinister mountains, 
over which there are always clouds and darkness. 
No matter how fine or windy or hot or cheerful 
it may be in Suva, that trans-sinutic region is 
nothing but forbidding and terrible. The Greeks 
would have made it the entrance of the other 
world — it is just what I've always imagined 
Avernus to be like. I'm irresistibly attracted by 
them, and when I come back from my cruise, I 
intend to walk among them. Shall I return? 



110 RUPERT BROOKE 

If not, spill some blood in a trench — you'll find 
the recipe in Homer — and my wandering shade 

will come for an hour or two to lap it 

The sunsets here ! the colour of the water over the 
reef ! the gloom and terror of those twisted moun- 
tains! and the extraordinary contrasts in the 
streets and the near country — for there are fifty 
thousand Hindoos, indentured labour, here, 
emaciated and proud, in Liberty-coloured gar- 
ments, mournful, standing out among these gay, 
pathetic, sturdy children the Fijians, The Hin- 
doos, who were civilised when we were Fijians; 
and the Fijians, who will never be civilised. And 
amongst them, weedy Australian clerks, uncer- 
tain whether they most despise a 'haw-haw Eng- 
lishman' or a 'dam nigger,' and without the con- 
science of the one or the charm of the other; 
secret devil-worshippers, admirers of America, 
English without tradition and Yankees without 
go. Give me a landed gentry, ten shillings on 
wheat, and hanging for sheep -stealing; also the 
Established Church, whence I spring." 

To Denis Browne he wrote about the dancing 
and the music: "I prefer watching a Siva-Siva 
to observing Nijinsky. Oh dear, I so wish you'd 
been with me for some of these native dances. 
I've got no ear, and can't get the tunes down. 
They're very simple — just a few bars with a scale 



A MEMOIR 111 

of about 5 notes, repeated over and over again. 
But it's the Rhythm that gets you. They get 
extraordinarily rhythmic effects, everybody beat- 
ing their hands, or tapping with a stick ; and the 
dancers swaying their bodies and tapping with 
their feet. None of that damned bounding and 
pirouetting. Just stylisierte pantomime, some- 
times slightly indecent. But most exciting. 
Next time I get sick of England, I'm going to 
bring you along out here, and work the whole 
thing out. 

"You won't know me when — if ever — I return. 
Many things I have lost; my knowledge of art 
and literature, my fragmentary manners, my 
acquaintance with the English tongue, and any 
slight intelligence I ever had; but I have gained 
other things; a rich red-brown for my skin, a 
knowledge of mixed drinks, an ability to talk or 
drink with any kind of man, and a large reper- 
toire of dirty stories. Am I richer or poorer? 
I don't know. I only regret that I shall never 
be able to mix in your or any intelligent circles 
again. I am indistinguishable (except by my 
poverty) from a Hall man." 

"Dear Miss Asquith," * he wrote in mid-De- 
cember from 'somewhere in the mountains of 
Fiji.' "Forgive this paper. Its limpness is be- 

1 Miss Violet Asquith, now Lady Bonham-Carter. 



112 RUPERT BROOKE 

cause it has been in terrific thunderstorms, and 
through most of the rivers in Fiji, in the last few 
days. Its marks of dirt are because small naked 
brown babies will crawl up and handle it. And 
any blood-stains will be mine. The point is, will 
they . . . ? It's absurd, I know. It's twenty 
years since they've eaten anybody, and far more 
since they've done what I particularly and un- 
reasonably detest — fastened the victim down, 
cut pieces off him one by one, and cooked and 
eaten them before his eyes. To witness one's 
own transubstantiation into a naked black man, 
that seems the last indignity. Consideration of 
the thoughts that pour through the mind of the 
ever-diminishing remnant of a man, as it sees its 
late limbs cooking, moves me deeply. I have 
been meditating a sonnet, as I sit here, sur- 
rounded by dusky faces and gleaming eyes: — 

Dear, they have poached the eyes you loved so well — 

It'd do well for No. 101 and last, in a modern 
sonnet-sequence, wouldn't it ? I don't know how 
it would go on. The fourth line would have to 
be 

And all my turbulent lips are maitre-d'hotel — 

I don't know how to scan French. I fancy that 
limps. But e alV is very strong in the modern 
style. 



A MEMOIR 113 

"The idea comes out in a slighter thing: — 

The limbs that erstwhile charmed your sight 
Are now a savage's delight; 
The ear that heard your whispered vow 
Is one of many entrees now; 
Broiled are the arms in which you clung, 
And devilled is the angelic tongue: . . . 
And oh ! my anguish as I see 
A Black Man gnaw your favourite knee! 
Of the two eyes that were your ruin, 
One now observes the other stewing. 
My lips (the inconstancy of man!) 
Are yours no more. The legs that ran 
Each dewy morn their love lo wake, 
x Are now a steak, are now a steak! . . . 

Oh, dear! I suppose it ought to end on the 
Higher Note, the Wider Outlook. Poetry has 
to, they tell me. You may caress details, all the 
main parts of the poem, but at last you have to 
open the window and turn to God, or Earth, or 
Eternity, or any of the Grand Old Endings. It 
gives Uplift, as we Americans say. And that's 
so essential. (Did you ever notice how the 
Browning family's poems all refer suddenly to 
God in the last line? It's laughable if you read 
through them in that way. 'What if that friend 
happened to be — God?' 'What comes next? 
Is it— God?' 'And with God be the rest.' 
'And if God choose, I shall but love thee better 



114 RUPERT BROOKE 

after death.' . . . etc., etc. I forget them all 
now. It shows what the Victorians were.) 
"So must I soar: — 

O love, O loveliest and best, 

Natives this body may digest; 

Whole, and still yours, my soul shall dwell, 

Uneaten, safe, incoctible . . . 

It's too dull. I shall go out and wander through 
the forest paths by the grey moonlight. Fiji in 
moonlight is like nothing else in this world or 
the next. It's all dim colours and all scents. 
And here, where it's high up, the most fantas- 
tically-shaped mountains in the world tower up 
all around, and little silver clouds and wisps of 
mist run bleating up and down the valleys and 
hillsides like lambs looking for their mother. 
There's only one thing on earth as beautiful ; and 
that's Samoa by moonlight. That's utterly dif- 
ferent, merely Heaven, sheer loveliness. You 
lie on a mat in a cool Samoan hut, and look out 
on the white sand under the high palms, and a 
gentle sea, and the black line of the reef a mile 
out, and moonlight over everything, floods and 
floods of it, not sticky, like Honolulu moonlight, 
not to be eaten with a spoon, but flat and abun- 
dant, such that you could slice thin golden-white 
shavings off it, as off cheese. And then among 



A MEMOIR 115 

it all are the loveliest people in the world, mov- 
ing and dancing like gods and goddesses, very 
quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content. 
It is sheer beauty, so pure that it's difficult to 
breathe in it — like living in a Keats world, only 
it's less syrupy — Endymion without sugar. 
Completely unconnected with this world. 
"There is a poem: 

I know an Island 

Where the long scented holy nights pass slow, 

And there, 'twixt lowland and highland, 

The white stream falls into a pool I know, 

Deep, hidden with ferns and flowers, soft as dreaming, 

Where the brown laughing dancing bathers go . . . 

It ends after many pages: 

I know an Island 

Where the slow fragrant-breathing nights creep past; 
And there, 'twixt lowland and highland, 
A deep, fern-shrouded, murmurous water glimmers; 
There I'll come back at last, 

And find my friends, the flower-crowned, laughing swim- 
mers, 
And— 1 

I forget. And I've not written the middle part. 
And it's very bad, like all true poems. I love 
England; and all the people in it; but oh, how 

1 These lines appear again, considerably altered, in the essay 
called Some Niggers, printed in Letters from America. 



116 RUPERT BROOKE 

can one know of heaven on earth and not come 
back to it ? I'm afraid I shall slip away from that 
slithery, murky place you're (I suppose) in now, 
and return — Ridiculous. 

"I continue in a hot noon, under an orange 
tree. We rose at dawn and walked many miles 
and swam seven large rivers and picked and ate 
many oranges and pineapples and drank cocoa- 
nuts. Now the two 'boys' who carry my luggage 
are asleep in the shade. They're Fijians of 
twenty-three or so who know a few words of 
English. One of them is the finest-made man 
I've ever seen; like a Greek statue come to life; 
strong as ten horses. To see him strip and swim 
a half -flooded river is an immortal sight. 

"Last night we stayed in the house of a moun- 
tain chief who has spasmodic yearnings after 
civilisation. When these grow strong, he sends 
a runner down to the coast to buy any illustrated 
papers he can find. He knows no English, but 
he pastes his favourite pictures up round the wall 
and muses over them. I lectured on them — 
fragments of the Sketch and Sphere for several 
years — to a half-naked reverent audience last 
night (through my interpreter of course) . The 
Prince of Wales, looking like an Oxford under- 
graduate, elbows two ladies who display 1911 
spring-fashions. A golf champion in a most 



A MEMOIR 117 

contorted position occupies a central place. He 
is regarded, I fancy, as a rather potent and vio- 
lent deity. To his left is 'Miss Viola Tree, as 
Eurydice,' to his right Miss Lilian M'Carthy as 
Jocasta, looking infinitely Mycenaean. I ex- 
plained about incest, shortly, and Miss M'C. rose 
tremendously in Fijian estimation. Why do 
people like their gods to be so eccentric, always? 
I fancy I left an impression that she was Mr. 
H. H. Hilton's (is that right? You're a golfer) 
mother and wife. It is so hard to explain our 
civilisation to simple people. Anyhow, I dis- 
turbed their theology and elevated Lillah to the 
top p lace. How Eurydice came in puzzled them 
and me. I fancy they regard her as a Holy 
Ghostess, in some sort. 

"It's very perplexing. These people — 
Samoans and Fijians — are so much nicer, and 
so much better-mannered, than oneself. They 
are stronger, teautifuller, kindlier, more hos- 
pitable and courteous, greater lovers of beauty, 
and even wittier, than average Europeans. And 
they are — under our influence — a dying race. 
We gradually fill their lands with plantations 
and Indian coolies. The Hawaians, up in the 
Sandwich Islands, have almost altogether gone, 
and their arts and music with them, and their 



118 RUPERT BROOKE 

islands are a replica of America. A cheerful 
thought, that all these places are to become in- 
distinguishable from Denver and Birmingham 
and Stuttgart, and the people of dress and be- 
haviour precisely like Herr Schmidt, and Mr. 
Robinson, and Hiram O. Guggenheim. And 
now they're so . . . it's impossible to describe 
how far nearer the Kingdom of Heaven — or the 
Garden of Eden — these good, naked, laughing 
people are than oneself or one's friends. . . . 
But I forget. You are an anti-socialist, and I 
mustn't say a word against our modern indus- 
trial system. I beg your pardon. 

"I go down to the coast to catch a boat to New 
Zealand, where I shall post this. Thence to 
Tahiti, to hunt for lost Gauguins. Then back 
to barbarism in America. God knows when I 
shall get home. In the spring, I hope. Is Eng- 
land still there? Forgive this endless scrawl. 

"I suppose you're rushing from lunch-party 
to lunch-party, and dance to dance, and opera 
to political platform. Won't you come and 
learn how to make a hibiscus-wreath for your 
hair, and sail a canoe, and swim two minutes 
under water catching turtles, and dive forty feet 
into a waterfall, and climb a cocoanut-palm? 
It's more worth while." 



A MEMOIR 119 

Sometimes the desire for England and his 
friends came uppermost. "I'd once thought it 
necessary to marry," he wrote to Jacques 
Raverat from Fiji. "I approve of marriage for 
the world. I think you're all quite right, so 
don't be alarmed. But not for me. I'm too 
old. The Point of Marriage is Peace — to work 
in. But can't one get it otherwise? Why, cer- 
tainly, when one's old. And so I will. I know 
what things are good: friendship and work and 
conversation. These I shall have. How one 
can fill life, if one's energetic and knows how to 
dig! I have thought of a thousand things to 
do, in books and poems and plays and theatres 
and societies and housebuilding and dinner- 
parties, when I get Home. We shall have fun. 
1 Now we have so painfully achieved middle-age, 
shall we not reap the fruits of that achievement, 
my dyspeptic friend? By God, yes! Will you 
come and walk with me in Spain next summer? 
;And will you join me on the Poet's Round? — a 
walk I've planned. One starts from Charing 
J Cross, in a south-easterly direction, and calls on 
jde la Mare at Anerley, and finds Davies at 
Sevenoaks — a day's march to Belloc at King's 
j Head, then up to Wibson x on the borders of 
'; Gloucestershire, back by Stratford, Rugby, and 

I * Wilfrid Gibson. 



120 RUPERT BROOKE 

the Chilterns, where Masefield and Chesterton 
dwell. Wouldn't it give one a queer idea of 
England? 

"Three months a year I am going to live with 
you and Gwen, three with Dudley and Anne, 
three with the Ranee, 1 and three alone. A per* 
feet life. I almost catch the next boat to 'Frisco 
at the thought of it." (At this point in the letter 
there is a constellation of blots, explained as 
'Tears of Memory.') 

"There is nothing in the world like friendship. 
And there is no man who has had such friends 
as I, so many, so fine, so various, so multiform, 
so prone to laughter, so strong in affection, and 
so permanent, so trustworthy, so courteous, so 
stern with vices and so blind to faults or folly, of 
such swiftness of mind and strength of body, so 
apt both to make jokes and to understand them. 
Also their faces are beautiful, and I love them. 
I repeat a long list of their names every night 
before I sleep. Friendship is always exciting, 
and yet always safe. There is no lust in it, and 
therefore no poison. It is cleaner than love, 
and older ; for children and very old people have 
friends, but they do not love. It gives more and 
takes less, it is fine in the enjoying, and without 
pain when absent, and it leaves only good memo- 

x His name for his mother. 



A MEMOIR 121 

ries. In love all laughter ends with an ache, but 
laughtei is the very garland on the head of friend- 
ship. I will not love, and I will not be loved. 
But I will have friends round me continually, 
all the days of my life, and in whatever lands I 
may be. So Ave shall laugh and eat and sing, and 
go great journeys in boats and on foot, and write 
plays and perform them, and pass innumerable 
laws taking their money from the rich. ... I 
err. I praise too extravagantly, conveying an 
impression that friendship always gives peace. 
And even at the moment I feel a hunger, too 
rending for complete peace, to see all your faces 
again and to eat food with you." 

Home thoughts from abroad of a different or- 
'der were sent to Miss Nesbitt: — "I see I'm go- 
jing to have the hell of an uncomfortable life," 
Ihe wrote. "I want too many different things. I 
keep now pining after London. I want to talk, 
talk, talk. Is there anything better in the world 
(than sitting at a table and eating good food and 
drinking great drink, and discussing everything 
under the sun with wise and brilliant peo- 

Jple? 

"Oh but I'm going to have such a time when I 
get back. I'm going to have the loveliest rooms 
in King's, and I'm going to spend 5 days a week 
J there, and 3 in London (that's 8, stoopid), and 



122 RUPERT BROOKE 

in King's I'm going to entertain all the mad 
and lovely people in the world, and I'm never 
going to sit down to dinner without a philoso- 
pher, a poet, a musician, an actress, a dancer, and 
a bishop at table with me. I'm going to get up 
such performances as will turn Cambridge upside 
down. I'm going to have Yeats and Cannan 
and Craig and Barker to give a lecture each on 
modern drama. I'm going to have my great 
play in the Grantchester garden. I'm going — 
oh, hell, I don't know what I'm going to do — 
but every morning I shall drift up and down the 
backs in a punt, discussing anything in the world 
with anybody who desires." 

He left Fiji in December. "Life's been get- 
ting madder and madder," he wrote from Auck- 
land on December 17th. "I tumbled into Fiji 
without a friend or an introduction, and left it 
a month later amidst the loud grief of the united 
population, white and black. The two 'boys' 
(aged 23 or 24) I took with me when I went 
walking through the centre of the island, to carry 
my bags, are my sworn and eternal friends. One 
of them ('Ambele,' under which I, but not you, 
can recognise 'Abel') was six foot high, very 
broad, and more perfectly made than any man or 
statue I have ever seen. His grin stretched from 



A MEMOIR 123 

ear to ear. And lie could carry me across rivers 
(when I was tired of swimming them, for we 
crossed vast rivers every mile or two) for a hun- 
dred yards or so, as I should carry a box of 
marches. I think of bringing him back with me 
as a servant or bodyguard to England. He 
loved me because, though I was far weaker than 
he, I was far braver. The Fijians are rather 
cowards. And on precipices I am peculiarly 
reckless. The boys saved me from rolling off 
to perdition about thirty times, and respected me 
for it, though thinking me insane. What would 
you say if I turned up with two vast cannibal 
servants, black-skinned and perpetually laugh- 
ing — all of us attired only in loin-cloths, and red 
flowers in our hair? I think I should be irre- 
sistible. 

"Why, precisely, I'm here, I don't know. I 
seem to have missed a boat somewhere, and I 
can't get on to Tahiti till the beginning of Janu- 
ary. Damn. And I hear that a man got to 
Tahiti two months ahead of me, and found — and 
carried off — some Gauguin paintings on glass. 
Damn ! 

"New Zealand turns out to be in the midst of 
summer, and almost exactly like England. I 
eat strawberries, large garden strawberries, 
every day; and it's the middle of December! It 



124 RUPERT BROOKE 

feels curiously unnatural, perverse, like some 
frightful vice out of Havelock Ellis. I blush 
and eat secretively. I'll describe New Zealand 
another day. It's a sort of Fabian England, 
very upper-middle-class and gentle and happy 
(after Canada), no poor, and the Government 
owning hotels and running char-a-bancs. All 
the women smoke, and dress very badly, and no- 
body drinks. Everybody seems rather ugly — 
but perhaps that's compared with the South 
Seas." 

The Englishness of New Zealand made home 
affairs vivid to him again, and he wrote vehe- 
mently to his mother about the Dublin Strike. 
"I feel wild about Dublin. I always feel in 
strikes that 'the men are always right,' as a man 
says in Clayhanger. Of course the poor are 
always right against the rich, though often 
enough the men are in the wrong over some point 
of the moment (it's not to be wondered at). 
But Dublin seems to be one of the clearest cases 
on record When the Times begins say- 
ing that the employers are in the wrong, they 
must be very unpardonably and rottenly so in- 
deed. I do hope people are contributing for the 
wives and children in Dublin. Could you send 
two guineas in my name? I'll settle when I get 



A MEMOIR 125 

back. But I'd like it done immediately. I expect 
you will have sent some yourself 

"The queer thing [about New Zealand]," he 
goes on, "is that they've got all the things in the 
Liberal or mild Fabian programme : — eight hour 
day (and less) , bigger old age pensions, access to 
the land, minimum w T age, insurance, etc., etc., 
and yet it's not Paradise. The same troubles 
exist in much the same form (except that there's 
not much bad poverty) . Cost of living is rising 
quicker than wages. There are the same trou- 
bles between unions and employers, and between 
rich and poor. I suppose there'll be no peace 
anywhere till the rich are curbed altogether." 

On the voyage from New Zealand to Tahiti he 
made great friends with a Lancashire business 
man, . Ir. Harold Ashworth, who wrote after his 
death to Mrs. Brooke. The letters show the 
kind of impression that he made on those who 
met him at this time. "I am happy to believe," 
says Mr. Ashworth, "that he and I became real 
friends, and many a time I would invoke his aid 
when my rather aggressive Radicalism brought 
the 'Smoke-room' men at me en masse. I never 
met so entirely likeable a chap, and when I 
could 'get him going' about his wanderings, or 
provoke him into discussions about Literature, 
I was one walking ear ! I almost wept 



126 RUPERT BROOKE 

to know I could never again see that golden head 
and kindly smile — 'Young Apollo,' I used to 
dub him in my mind, whilst the fresh wind tossed 
his hair, and his boyish eyes lit up with pleasure 
at some of my anecdotes of strange people and 

places Your son was not merely a 

genius; what is perhaps more important, he had a 
charm that was literally like Sunshine. To say 
his manner was perfect is putting it quite inade- 
quately His memory is blessed by 

hundreds of men like me who were so fortunate 
as to meet him and were the better for that happy 
adventure." 

Another friend made on his travels was 
Reginald Berkeley, who was his chief companion 
on his excursions in Fiji. Rupert sent him from 
the s.s. Niagara a long letter about the technique 
of writing. "One can only advise people two 
or three years younger," he says. "Beyond that, 
one has forgotten." The end of it shows him 
insisting on the importance for artists of the atti- 
tude which he had recommended for everyone in 
his letter to Ben Keeling of three years before. 
"Finally," he says, "I charge you, be kind to life; 
and do not bruise her with the bludgeon of the 
a priori. Poor dirty woman, she responds to 
sympathy. Sympathetic imagination with every- 
body and everything is the artist's one duty. He 



A MEMOIR 127 

should be one with every little clergyman, and 
the stockbroker's most secret hope should be his 
hope. In the end, the words of Strindberg's 
heroine are the only motto, 'The race of man is 
greatly to be pitied.' Isn't that true? Hatred 
should be given out sparingly. It's too valuable 
to use carelessly. And, misused, it prevents 
understanding. And it is our duty to under- 
stand; for if we don't, no one else will." 

His next stay was about three months in 
Tahiti. "I've decided to stay here another 
month," he wrote to Miss Nesbitt in February, 
"for two very good reasons: (1) that I haven't 
enough money to get out, (2) that I've found 
the most ideal place in the world to live and work 
in. 1 A wide verandah over a blue lagoon, a 
wooden pier with deep clear water for diving, 
and coloured fish that swim between your toes. 
There also swim between your toes, more or less, 
scores of laughing brown babies from two years 
to fourteen. Canoes and boats, rivers, fishing 
with spear net and line, the most wonderful food 
in the world — strange fishes and vegetables per- 
fectly cooked. Europe slides from me terrify- 
ingly Will it come to your having to 

1 This was at Mataiea, about 30 miles from the chief town, Pa- 
peete. 



128 RUPERT BROOKE 

fetch me? The boat's ready to start; the brown 
lovely people in their bright clothes are gathered 
on the old wharf to wave her away. Everyone 
has a white flower behind their ear. Mamua has 
given me one. Do you know the significance of 
a white flower worn over the ear? A white 
flower over the right ear means 'I am looking 
for a sweetheart.' And a white flower over the 
left ear means 'I have found a sweetheart.' And 
a white flower over each ear means 'I have one 
sweetheart, and am looking for another.' A 
white flower over each ear, my dear, is dreadfully 
the most fashionable way of adorning yourself in 
Tahiti. 

"Bon voyage to the travellers. Good luck 
to everybody else. Love to the whole world. 
Tonight we will put scarlet flowers in our hair, 
and sing strange slumbrous South Sea songs to 
the concertina, and drink red French wine, and 
dance, and bathe in a soft lagoon by moonlight, 
and eat great squelchy tropical fruits, custard- 
apples, papaia, pomegranate, mango, guava and 
the rest. Urana. I have a million lovely and 
exciting things to tell you — but not now." 

How thoroughly he became imbued with the 
life, the feeling, and the philosophy of the islands, 
appears from a sociological epistle which he wrote 



A MEMOIR 129 

to Jacques Raverat after his return to Eng- 
land. "As for Land, my Frog, we must have 
a great deal held in common. It is good for 
men to work of themselves, but not too much for 
themselves. In my part of the world, if we want 
to build a canoe, we all put wreaths in our hair, 
and take the town hatchet, and Bill's axe, and 
each his own hunting-knife, and have a bit of pig 
each for luck, and a drink, and go out. And as 
we go we sing. And when we have got to a 
large tree we sit round it. And the two biggest 
men take the axes and hit the tree in turn. And 
the rest of us beat our hands rhythmically and 
sing a song saying 'That is a tree — cut down the 
tree — we will make a boat,' and so on. And 
when those two are tired, they drink and sit, and 
other two take their places . . . and later the 
hollowing of the canoe, and the fashioning of an 
out-rigger, and the making of benches and the 
shaping of paddles. And when all's done, we 
go home and sing all night, and dance a great 
deal. For we have another canoe. 

"And when you have got a lot of other God- 
dites together and started to build a Cathedral, 
why, you'll see what fun it is working together, 
instead of in a dirty little corner alone, suspicious, 
greedy, competitive, hating all the world, like 



130 RUPERT BROOKE 

a modern artist or a French peasant or a money- 
lender or a golfer." 

He had begun writing verse again, and in the 
Vide verandah' he wrote or finished Tiare 
Tahiti, 1 Retrospect, and the Great Lover, 2 which 
he sent me (he had appointed me his 'literary 
agent or grass-executor' during his travels) 3 for 
New Numbers. This publication had been 
planned in July by correspondence with Las- 
celles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater and Wil- 
frid Gibson. They meant at first to call it The 
Gallows Garland, after The Gallows, Aber- 
crombie's cottage in Gloucestershire, from which 
it was to be published; and Rupert thought the 
change very stupid. He had sketched the con- 
tents of the first number. Abercrombie was to 
contribute a short epic on Asshurbanipal and 
Nebuchadnezzar, Drinkwater an ode called The 
Sonority of God, and Gibson two narrative 

*A postscript to a letter to his mother elucidates a line in this 
poem. "They call me Pupure here — it means 'fair' in Tahitian — 
because I have fair hair!" 

2 Speculation has been aroused by the line in this poem praising 
'the comfortable smell of friendly fingers.' When asked whose 
fingers, he said his nurse's; and admitted that it might have been 
the soap. 

3 He took large views of my duties. "Damn it," he had written 
from Vancouver, "what's the good of a friend if he can't sit 
down and write off a few poems for one at a pinch? That's what 
I count on your doing, if the editors press." 

I hope this note will not start a vain hunt for spuria among the 
published poems. 



A MEMOIR 131 

poems, Poor Bloody Bill and The Brave Poor 
Thing, from a series named Gas-Stoves. 
Rupert himself did not expect to manage more 
than one sonnet, to be entitled Oh dear! Oh 
dear! The first number came out in February 
1914; and after three more issues it was discon- 
tinued because of the war, before his death had 
broken the fair companionship. 

To illustrate his method of work at this time, it 
may be of interest to print the first draft of the 
Psychical Research sonnet, with his corrections: 

, when we're beyond the sun, 
Not with vain tears we'll beat, when all is done, 
We'll beat 
Unheard on the substantial doors, nor tread 

aimless 
Those dusty high-roads of the wandering Dead 
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run 
Remembering Earth. We'll turn, I think, and run 
Down some close-covered by-way of the air, 
Some 

Or low sweet alley between wind and wind, 
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find 
Pull down the shadows over us, and find 
Some 

A whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there 
Spend in pure converse our eternal day; 
Think each in each, immediately wise; 



132 RUPERT BROOKE 

Learn all we lacked before, hear, know, and say 
What this tumultuous body now denies; 
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away; 
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes. 1 

But to return to Tahiti. "I've been ill," he 
wrote to me on March 7th. "I got some beastly 
coral-poisoning into my legs, and a local microbe 
on the top of that, and made the places worse 
by neglecting them, and sea-bathing all day 
(which turns out to be the worst possible thing) . 
I was in the country when it came on bad, and 
tried native remedies, which took all the skin off, 
and produced such a ghastly appearance that I 

hurried into town I've got over it now, 

and feel very spry. I'm in a hovel at the back of 
the hotel, and contemplate the yard. The ex- 
traordinary life of the place flows round and 
through my room — for here no one, man or 
woman, scruples to come through one's room at 
any moment, if it happens to be a short cut. By 
day nothing much happens in the yard — except 

1 Though there are no changes in the concluding lines, I print 
them for the sake of a parallel, shown me by John Drinkwater, 
in Andrew MarvelPs Dialogue between Soul and Body, where 
Soul says: 

O, who shall from this dungeon raise 

A soul enslaved so many ways, 

With bolts of bones, that fettered stands 

In feet, and manacled in hands; 

Here blinded with an eye, and there 

Deaf with the drumming of an ear? 



A MEMOIR 183 

when a horse tried to eat a hen the other after- 
noon. But by night, after ten, it's filled with flit- 
ting figures of girls, with wreaths of white flow- 
ers, keeping assignations. Occasionally two 
rivals meet, and fill the darker corners with cur- 
sings and scratchings. Or occasionally a youth 
intercepts a faithless lady, and has a pretty oper- 
atic scene under my window. It is all — all Pa- 
peete — like a Renaissance Italy, with the venom 
taken out. No, simpler, light-come and light-go, 
passionate and forgetful, like children, and all 
the time South Pacific, that is to say unmalicious 
and good-tempered 

"I really do feel a little anchorless. I shall 
be glad to be back among you all, and tied to 
somewhere in England. I'll never, never, never 
go to sea again. All I want in life is a cottage, 
and leisure to write supreme poems and plays. 
I can't do it in this vagabondage." 

I don't know what happened between this let- 
ter and the next to produce the gloom it shows 
about his work. He had always, at school and 
onwards, been apt to have fits of thinking that 
he would never write again, but this time the 
foreboding seems more serious than usual. He 
begins cheerfully 'some time in March': "It's so 
funny; getting a letter of January 25, and not 
having heard anything from anybody since Octo- 



134 RUPERT BROOKE 

ber. Your letter of November, announcing 
your marriage with [someone very improbable] ; 
your kindly Christmas information about the 
disastrous fire in Bilton Road and the disposal 
of the Ranee's and Alfred's cinders; your New 
Year's epistle announcing your, Wilfrid's and 
Albert's Knighthoods; the later letter that re- 
counted your conversations with Shaw, the 
Earthquake, the War with Germany, the Chinese 
Ballet, Stravinsky's comic opera, the new El 
Greco, Gilbert [CannanJ's trial, Masefield's 
latest knock-about farce, Arthur Benson's duel 
... all these I have not yet had. They await 
me in 'Frisco. So I take up the threads at the 
25th of January — now itself some way down in 
the heap of yesterday's seven thousand years — 
and study them rather confusedly. Flecker — 
Wilfrid — poetry — plays — Moulin d'Or — Hullo 
Tango! they all stir, these names, some dusty 
memories away in the back of my subconscious- 
ness. Somewhere they must have meant some- 
thing to me, in another life. A vision of taxis 
slides across the orange and green of the sunset. 
For a moment the palms dwindle to lamp-posts. 

So a poor ghost beside his misty streams 

Is haunted by strange doubts and fugitive dreams, 

Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men, 

Rocks, stars, and skin, things unintelligible, 



A MEMOIR 135 

And the sun on waving grass — he knows not when, 
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. 1 

(You recognise the master-hand?) 

"I must come back and see if I can take to it 
again. Plan out a life for me for next year, 
Eddie. (Here follows another sketch for living 
at Cambridge, much the same as the one already- 
given.) The other half of the week I shall re- 
side with you — I warn you. 

"But, my dear, I doubt if you'll have me. 
The Game is Up, Eddie. If I've gained facts 
through knocking about with Conrad characters 
in a Gauguin entourage, — I've lost a dream or 
two. I tried to be a poet. And because I'm a 
clever writer, and because I was forty times as 
sensitive as anybody else, I succeeded a little. 
Es ist voruber; es ist imwiederruflich zu Ende. 
I am what I came out here to be. Hard, quite, 
quite hard. I have become merely a minor char- 
acter in a Kipling story. 

"I'll never be able to write anything more, I 
think; or perhaps I can do plays of a sort. . . . 
I think I'll have to manage a theatre. I feel 
very energetic; and very capable. Is that a 
great come-down? I think that what I really 
feel like is living. I want to talk and talk and 

1 An unrevised form of part of the sonnet Hauntings, 



136 RUPERT BROOKE 

talk . . . and in the intervals have extraordinary- 
adventures. Perhaps this, too, is a come-down. 
But haven't I, at 26, reached the age when one 
should begin to learn? An energy that had 
rushed on me with the cessation of my leprous 
skin-disease, and the approaching end of six 
months' peace of soul, is driving me furiously on. 
This afternoon I go fishing in a canoe with a 
native girl on a green and purple reef. Tonight 
from ten to two, spearing fish in the same lagoon 
by torchlight. Tomorrow at dawn, up into the 
mountains on foot with a mad Englishman, four 
natives, and a half-caste, to a volcanic lake in the 
interior. There we build a house and stay for 
two days. The natives return, and the M.E. 
and myself push on for and pass down to the 
other coast. Perhaps we get it. Perhaps not. 

"In any case we hope to see some ghosts — 
they abound in the interior. They come to you 
by night, and as you watch them their bellies 
burst, and their entrails fall to the ground, and 
their eyes — unpupilled balls of white — fall out 
too, and they stink and shine. This morning I've 
been reading The Triumph of Time, and Bartho- 
lomew Fair 

"Learning, learning, learning. ... Is there 
anything else to do except taste 2 . Will you come 
with me to Morocco, Persia, Russia, Egypt, 



A MEMOIR 137 

Abyssinia, and the Aran Islands? I'm afraid I 
shan't be able to settle down at home. It'll be 
an advantage that I can come to England 
through America. For then, I'll find it so 
lovely that I won't be hankering after sunlight 
and brown people and rainbow-coloured fish. 
At least, I won't for some months, or a year. 

"I'll learn at home, a bit. There's so much 
to learn there — if only one's sensible enough to 
know it. And I feel hard enough to make the 
attempt. I want to love my friends and hate my 
enemies, again. Both greatly — but not too 
much. Which brings me round to [an enemy] 
and Clubs I want a club to take an oc- 
casional stranger into, for a drink, and to read the 
papers in, and sometimes to have a quiet meal in. 
Where do you think I should go? I want some- 
where I needn't always be spick and span in, 
and somewhere I don't have to pay a vast sum. 
Alas, why are there no decent clubs? What do 
the jolly people all do? I want to belong to the 
same club as de la Mare. Where does de la 
Mare go? To Anerley, S.E., I suppose. 

There was once a-metrist of Anerley, 

Whose neighbours were mundane but mannerly. 

They don't cavil the least 

At a stray anapaest, 
But they do bar his spondees in Anerley. 



138 RUPERT BROOKE 

I'll post this and send off my bundle of MSS. 
from 'Frisco." 

He left Tahiti in April. "Last night," he 
wrote on the steamer, "I looked for the Southern 
Cross as usual, and looked for it in vain — like 
the moon for Omar Khayyam — it had gone down 
below the horizon. It is still shining and wheel- 
ing for those good brown people in the islands — 
and they're laughing and kissing and swimming 
and dancing beneath it — but for me it is set ; and 
I don't know that I shall ever see it again. It's 
queer. I was sad at heart to leave Tahiti. But 
I resigned myself to the vessel, and watched the 
green shores and rocky peaks fade with hardly a 
pang. I had told so many of those that loved 
me, so often, 'oh yes, I'll come back — next year 
perhaps, or the year after' — that I suppose I'd 
begun to believe it myself. It was only yester- 
day, when I knew that the Southern Cross had 
left me, that I suddenly realised I had left be- 
hind those lovely places and lovely people, per- 
haps for ever. I reflected that there was surely 
nothing else like them in this world, and very 
probably nothing in the next, and that I was 
going far away from gentleness and beauty and 
kindliness, and the smell of the lagoons, and the 
thrill of that dancing, and the scarlet of the 
flamboyants, and the white and gold of other 



A MEMOIR 139 

flowers ; and that I was going to America, which 
is full of harshness and hideous sights, and ugly- 
people, and civilisation, and corruption, and 
bloodiness, and all evil. So I wept a little, and 
very sensibly went to bed 

"Certain reprehensible corners of my heart 
whisper to me, 'There's a village in Samoa, with 
the moonlight on the beach' — or 'I've heard of a 
hill in Japan' — or 'one said there's an inn in 
Thibet over a sheer precipice' — or 'the Victoria 
Nyanza is an attractive lake' — or 'that trail in the 
North-West up the Mackenzie — Morris said 
he'd go whenever I wanted' — or 'I wonder if it's 
true about that flower in the Andes that smells 
like no other flower upon earth, and when once a 
man has smelt it he can't but return there to live 
in those hills in the end, though he come back 
from the ends of the earth.' 

"I'll be Wordsworth's lark, that soars but 
doesn't roam, true to the kindred points of 
heaven and home. These scraps of English 
poetry start whispering within me — that means 
I'm North of the Equator, doesn't it? It's a 
good sign, perhaps. English thoughts are wak- 
ing in me. They'll fetch me back. Call me 
home, I pray you. I've been away long enough. 
I'm older than I was. I've left bits of me about 
— some of my hair in Canada, and one skin in 



140 RUPERT BROOKE 

Honolulu, and another in Fiji, and a bit of a 
third in Tahiti, and half a tooth in Samoa, and 
bits of my heart all over the place. I'm deader 
than I was. Partir, cest tou jours mourir un peu 
— you know that admirable and true proverb, 
don't you? A little old Frenchman, a friend of 
mine, told it me as we leaned over the rail and 
watched the waving crowds and the red roofs and 
the hills and the clouds dwindle and vanish. He 
was going home to France for a year for his 
health. 'Home,' he'd be angry at that. f Mon 
home c'est id/ he told me repeatedly. He is mar- 
ried to a native woman these fifteen years — no 
children of his own, but plenty adopted. She was 
so much finer than a white woman, he sighed — so 
lovely, so faithful, so competent, so charming and 
happy, and so extraordinarily intelligent. I 
told him what Tagore told me about white 
women compared with Indian, and he gave me 
his observations, and we entirely agreed, and 
forgot our sorrows in inventing bilingual insults 
to the swarms of ugly American and Colonial 
girls on board." 

"Oh, God! Oh, God!" his next letter to me 
began, from San Francisco in April. "How I 
hate civilisation and houses and trams and col- 
lars." But the shock was tempered to him. 
"I've found good friends in the quieter parts of 



A MEMOIR 14U 

this region, who live in a garden filled with roses 
and hyacinths and morning-glory. So I'll rest a 
day or two and try to get over the effects of my 
first re-entry into civilisation. And then I'll 
sneak away East and come home. I want to live 
in a hut by a river and pretend I'm Polynesian. 
Will you come and see me o' week's ends? 

Oh ! Oh ! I am old as death. Uranial" 

And from the train: "I read books on Indirect 
Primaries} just to get the South Seas out of my 
blood. One must remember one has trousers on 
again. I had a faint thought of going to Mex- 
ico. But I guess it won't be much of a war. 
You'll be vanishing for Whitsuntide soon. A 
yachting trip to Ulster? I do hope you're going 
to let the Orangemen slit all the priests' throats 
first; and then shoot them. I'll enlist on either 
side, any day. Your gnostic. Rupert." 

"It's eleven months," he wrote to Miss Nesbitt 
from Arizona, "that I've not been looked after, 
and my clothes are in an awful state, and my hair 
not cut, and I rarely shave. I'm so tired of it. 
Comprenny? Do you get me? I shall — (pre- 
pare your ears and hold tight) — shall sail from 
New York on June 6th, and by June 15th I shall 

1 He was also reading Boswell. "I've discovered," he wrote, 
"that Dr. Johnson is the only man I love. An Englishman, by 
God!" 



142 RUPERT BROOKE 

be in London. My dear, one thing I would 
implore you. It's very silly. But don't tell 
anybody the exact day I'm coming back. It's 
my fancy to blow in on them unexpected — just 
to wander into Raymond Buildings and hear 
Eddie squeak 'Oh, my dear, I thought you were 
in Tahiti!' It's awfly silly and romantic, but 
the thought does give me the keenest and most 
exquisite pleasure. Don't give away one of the 
first poets in England — but there is in him still a 
very very small portion that's just a little child- 
ish." 

"I have such news," he wrote in his next letter. 
"It begins with Maurice Browne 1 and his wife 
going to Europe a week sooner than I had 
planned to. We squabbled, I saying they should 
defer their departure a week for the pleasure of 
going with me; they, ridiculously, that I should 
hasten my leaving this land some seven days 
for the honour of their companionship. Neither 
side would yield; so we parted in wrath. They 
pettily, I with some dignity. Coming here, I 
found two engagements fallen through; and last 
night I dreamed very vividly that I arrived in 
England, and telephoned to everybody I knew, 
and they were awfully nice, and then went round 
and saw them, and they were lovely. Friends I 

1 Director of the Little Theatre at Chicago. 



A MEMOIR 143 

had known long ago, between whom and myself 
evil and pain has come, greeted me in the old 
first way; and other friends who have stayed 
friends were wonderfully the same; and there 

were new friends I woke laughing and 

crying. I felt I must get back. I telephoned to 
Browne, flew to some agents, and in consequence 
I sail from New York on May 29th, and reach 
Plymouth — oh blessed name, oh loveliness ! Ply- 
mouth — was there ever so sweet and droll a 
sound? Drake's Plymouth, English Western 
Plymouth, city where men speak softly, and 
things are sold for shillings, not for dollars; and 
jthere is love, and beauty, and old houses ; and be- 
yond which there are little fields, very green, 
bounded by small piled walls of stone; and be- 
hind them — I know it — the brown and black, 
'splintered, haunted moor. By that the train 
shall go up; by Dartmouth, where my brother 
was — I will make a litany; by Torquay, where 
Verrall stayed; and by Paignton, where I have 
walked in the rain; past Ilsington, where John 
Ford was born, and Appledore, in the inn of 
which I wrote a poem against a commercial trav- 
eller; by Dawlish, of which John Keats sang; 
within sight of Widdicombe, where old Uncle 
Tom Cobley rode a mare; not a dozen miles from 
John Galsworthy at Manaton; within sight al- 



1U RUPERT BROOKE 

most of that hill at Drewsteignton on which I 
lay out all one September night, crying — and to 
Exeter, and to Ottery St. Mary where Coleridge 
sojourned; and across Wiltshire, where men built 
and sang many centuries before the Aquila. Oh 
noble train, oh glorious and forthright and Eng- 
lish train! I will look round me at the English 
faces, and out at the English fields, and I will 

pray reach Plymouth, as I was saying when 

I was interrupted, on Friday, June 5th." 

I got wind of his design to arrive like a bolt 
from the blue, and represented the disaster it 
would be if he came and found the door closed 
against him. He yielded, and at 2.45 a.m. on 
June 6th (for the forthright English train was 
very late) Denis Browne and I met him at Pad- 
dington. 



VI 



All the old threads were picked up at once. 
"To the poor stay-at-home," writes Walter de la 
Mare, "the friend who placidly reappeared from 
the ends of the earth seemed as little changed as 
one who gaily and laughingly goes to bed and 
gaily and laughingly comes down next morning 
after a perfectly refreshing sleep." He was still 
exactly the 'Young Apollo' of Mrs. Cornford's 



A MEMOIR 145 

Cambridge epigram; though the glint of quite 
peculiarly real shining gold that had always been 
in his hair had been tanned out of it by the South- 
ern sun ; and though one felt, in a hundred inde- 
finable ways, that he was now more than ever 
'prepared' ; not, as it turned out, for the 'long lit- 
tleness of life,' but rather for its brief greatness. 
The morning after his return he hurried off to 
Rugby for a few days with his mother. Then he 
had six crowded, happy weeks, mostly in Lon- 
don, seeing old friends and making new ones — 
including Lascelles Abercrombie, whom he met 
for the first time, though they had long been 
friends by proxy and by correspondence. His 
shyness, which had always been a part of his 
rather curious modesty and 'unspoiltness,' was 
wearing off ; and I am told he confessed, on being 
asked, that it had now dawned upon him for the 
first time that when he came into a room where 
there were new people the chances were that they 
would like him, rather than not. 

At the end of July came the war-cloud — and 
then the war. He has described his feelings when 
he heard the news in the essay An Unusual 
Young 31 an (the setting is imaginary — he was 
not returning from a cruise, but staying with the 
Cornfords in Norfolk) . At first he was just un- 



146 RUPERT BROOKE 

happy and bewildered. "I'm so uneasy — sub- 
consciously," he wrote. "All the vague perils of 
the time — the world seems so dark — and I'm 
vaguely frightened. I feel hurt to think that 
France may suffer. And it hurts, too, to think 
that Germany may be harmed by Russia. And 
I'm anxious that England may act rightly. I 
can't bear it if she does wrong." 

"I've just been to a music-hall," he wrote early 
in August. "It was pretty full. Miss C. Loftus 
was imitating somebody I saw infinite years 
ago — Elsie Janis — in her imitation of a prehis- 
toric figure called Frank Tinney. God ! how far 
away it all seemed. Then a dreadful cinemato- 
graphic reproduction of a hand drawing patriotic 
things — Harry Furniss it was, funny pictures of 
a soldier and a sailor (at the time I suppose dying 
in Belgium), a caricature of the Kaiser, greeted 
with a perfunctory hiss — nearly everyone sat si- 
lent. Then a scribbled message was shown: 
'War declared with Austria 11,9.' There was a 
volley of quick, low hand-clapping — more a sig- 
nal of recognition than anything else. Then we 
dispersed into Trafalgar Square and bought mid- 
night War editions. ... In all these days I 
haven't been so near tears; there was such trag- 
edy and dignity in the people 



"A MEMOIR 147 

"If there's any good in anything I've done, 
it's made by the beauty and goodness of ... a 
few I've known. All these people at the front 
who are fighting muddledly enough for some idea 
called England — it's some faint shadowing of 
! goodness and loveliness they have in their hearts 
to die for." 

For the first day or two he did not realise that 

j he must fight — one of his ideas was to go to 

. France and help get in the crops. But before we 

. had been at war a week he was back in London, 

seeking out the best way to serve as a soldier. 

"I've spent a fortnight," he wrote on August 

] 24th, "in chasing elusive employment about. 

I For a time I got drilled on the chance of getting 

into a London corps as a private, but now I really 

1 think I shall get a commission. Territorial prob- 

i ably, through Cambridge. The whole thing, and 

, the insupportable stress of this time, tired me to a 

useless rag." 

J Early in September Winston Churchill offered 

: him a commission in the Royal Naval Division, 

then forming; and he and Denis Browne * joined 



1 1 may here briefly commemorate William Denis Browne, whose 

death at 26 left no monument of his powers, except a few songs 

of great beauty. He was a musician of rare promise and complete 

equipment; and I have high authority for saying that his grasp of 

! the foundations and tendencies of modern music was unique. I 

| cannot here describe the singular charm of his character and per- 

i sonality. Enough that he never failed in honour, or in kindness, 



148 RUPERT BROOKE 

the Anson Battalion on September 27th. I saw 
them off to Betteshanger Camp from Charing 
Cross — excited and a little shy, like two new boys 
going to school — happy and handsome in their 
new uniforms, and specially proud of their caps, 
which had very superior badges. 

The Anson soon went to Chatham for mus- 
ketry, and there he wrote: "Often enough I feel 
a passing despair. I mean what you meant — 
the gulf between non-combatants and combat- 
ants. Yet it's not that — it's the withdrawal of 
combatants into a special seclusion and reserve. 
We're under a curse — or a blessing, or a vow to 
be different. The currents of our lives are in- 
terrupted. What is it . . .1 know — yes. The 
central purpose of my life, the aim and end of 
it now, the thing God wants of me, is to get good 
at beating Germans. That's sure. But that isn't 
what it was. What it was, I never knew; and 
God knows I never found it. But it reached out 
deeply for other things than my present need. 
. . . There is the absence. Priests and crim- 
inals — we're both — are celibates . . . and so I 

or in good sense, or in humour; and there were many who loved 
him. 

He was a friend of Rupert's at Rugby, at Cambridge, and in 
London; last, his brother-in-arms ; and he eared for him, as will 
be told, in his mortal illness. Six weeks afterwards, on the 4th of 
June, he followed him, fighting with high gallantry in the attack 
on the Turkish trenches before Krithia. 



A MEMOIR 149 

feel from my end sometimes that it is a long, long 
way to Tipperary. And yet, all's well. I'm the 
happiest person in the world." 

There were humours in the life; for instance, 
a false alarm of invasion at Chatham, when 
"elderly men rushed about pulling down swords 
from the messroom walls, and fastened them on 
with safety-pins"; or this incident in the day's 
routine: "I had to make an inventory the other 
day of all their kit, to compare with what they 
should have. I soon found that questions about 
some of the articles on the lists were purely 
academic. 'How many handkerchiefs have you?' 
The first two men were prompted to say 'none.' 
The third was called Cassidy. 'How many 
phwat, sorr?' 'Handkerchiefs.' — '?' — 'Handker- 
chiefs, man, handkerchiefs.' (In a hoarse whis- 
per to the Petty Officer) 'Phwat does he mane?' 
\ P.O. (in a stage whisper), 'Ter blow yer nose 
with, yer bloody fool.' Cassidy (rather indig- 
nant), 'None, sorr!' They were dears, and very 
strong, some of them." 

On the 4th of October they sailed for Antwerp. 
When it was all over, and he was having a little 
leave in London, he wrote to a friend: "I've 
; been extremely slack and sleepy these last few 
| days. I think it was the reaction after the ex- 
citement. . Also I caught conjunctivitis, alias 



150 RUPERT BROOKE 

pink-eye, in some of the foul places we slept in; 
and my eyes have been swollen, red, unlovely, 
exuding a thick plum-tree gum, and very pain- 
ful. I hope they're getting better It's 

only a fortnight ago ! We were pulled out of bed 
at 5 a.m. on the Sunday, and told that we started 
at 9. We marched to Dover, highly excited, 
only knowing that we were bound for Dunkirk, 
and supposing that we'd stay there quietly, train- 
ing, for a month. Old ladies waved handker- 
chiefs, young ladies gave us apples, and old men 
and children cheered, and we cheered back, and 
I felt very elderly and sombre, and full of 
thought of how human life was a flash between 
darknesses, and that oc per cent of those who 
cheered would be blown into another world within 
a few months ; and they all seemed to me so in- 
nocent and pathetic and noble, and my eyes grew 

round and tear-stained [Arrived at 

Dunkirk] we sat in a great empty shed a quarter 
of a mile long, waiting for orders. After dark the 
senior officers rushed round and informed us that 
we were going to Antwerp, that our train was 
sure to be attacked, and that if we got through 
we'd have to sit in trenches till we were wiped 
out. So we all sat under lights writing last let- 
ters, a very tragic and amusing affair. It did 
bring home to me how very futile and unfinished 



A MEMOIR 151 

my life was. I felt so angry. I had to imagine, 
supposing I was killed. There was nothing ex- 
cept a vague gesture of good-bye to you and my 
mother and a friend or two. I seemed so remote 
and barren and stupid. I seemed to have missed 
everything. 

"We weren't attacked that night in the train. 
So we got out at Antwerp and marched through 
the streets, and everyone cheered and flung them- 
selves on us, and gave us apples and chocolate 
and flags and kisses, and cried Vivent les Anglais 
and 'Heep! Heep! Heep!' 

"We got out to a place called Vieux Dieux 
(or something like it) passing refugees and Bel- 
gian soldiers by millions. Every mile the noises 
got louder, immense explosions and detonations. 
We stopped in the town square at Vieux Dieux ; 
five or six thousand British troops, a lot of Bel- 
gians, guns going through, transport- waggons, 
motorcyclists, orderlies on horses, staff officers, 
and the rest. An extraordinary and thrilling 
confusion. As it grew dark the thunders in- 
creased, and the sky was lit by extraordinary 
glares. We were all given entrenching tools. 
Everybody looked worried. Suddenly our bat- 
talion was marched round the corner out of the 
din, through an old gate in the immense wild gar- 
den of a recently-deserted villa-chateau. There 



152 RUPERT BROOKE 

we had to sleep. On the rather dirty and wild- 
looking sailors trudged, over lawns, through or- 
chards, and across pleasaunces. Little pools 
glimmered through the trees, and deserted foun- 
tains; and round corners one saw, faintly, occa- 
sional Cupids and Venuses — a scattered company 
of rather bad statues — gleaming quietly. The 
sailors dug their latrines in the various rose-gar- 
dens, and lay down to sleep— but it was bitter 
cold— under the shrubs. By two the shells had 
got unpleasantly near, and some message came. 
So up we got— frozen and sleepy— and toiled off 
through the night. By dawn we got into trenches 
— very good ones — and relieved Belgians. 

"This is very dull. And it doesn't really re- 
flect my state of mind. For when I think back 
on it, my mind is filled with various disconnected 
images and feelings. And if I could tell you 
these fully, you might find it wonderful, or at 
least queer. There's the excitement in the 
trenches (we weren't attacked seriously in our 
part) with people losing their heads and fussing 
and snapping. It's queer to see the people who 
do break under the strain of danger and respon- 
sibility. It's always the rotten ones. Highly 
sensitive people don't, queerly enough. I was 
relieved to find I was incredibly brave! I don't 
know how I should behave if shrapnel were 



A MEMOIR 153 

bursting over me and knocking the men round 
me to pieces. But for risks and nerves and fa- 
tigues I was all right. That's cheering. 

"And there's the empty blue sky and the 
peaceful village and country scenery, and noth- 
ing of war to see except occasional bursts of white 
smoke, very lazy and quiet, in the distance. But 
to hear — incessant thunder, shaking buildings 
and ground, and you and everything ; and above, 
recurrent wailings, very thin and queer, like lost 
souls, crossing and recrossing in the emptiness — 
nothing to be seen. Once or twice a lovely glit- 
tering aeroplane, very high up, would go over 
us ; and then the shrapnel would be turned on it, 
and a dozen quiet little curls of white smoke 
would appear round the creature — the whole 
thing like a German woodcut, very quaint and 
peaceful and unreal. 

"But the retreat drowned all these impressions. 
We stole away from the trenches, across half 
Antwerp, over the Scheldt, and finally entrained 
in the last train left, at 7.30 next morning. The 
march through those deserted suburbs, mile on 
mile, with never a living being, except our rather 
ferocious-looking sailors stealing sulkily along. 
The sky was lit by burning villages and houses; 
and after a bit we got to the land by the river, 
where the Belgians had let all the petrol out of 



154 RUPERT BROOKE 

the tanks and fired it. Rivers and seas of flames 
leaping up hundreds of feet, crowned by black 
smoke that covered the entire heavens. It lit up 
houses wrecked by shells, dead horses, demol- 
ished railway-stations, engines that had been 
taken up with their lines and signals, and all 
twisted round and pulled out, as a bad child spoils 

a toy The glare was like hell. We 

passed on, out of that, across a pontoon bridge 
built on boats. Two German spies tried to blow 
it up while we were on it. They were caught and 
shot. We went on through the dark. The refu- 
gees and motor-buses and transport and Belgian 
troops grew thicker. After about a thousand 
years it was dawn. The motor-buses indicated 
that we were bound for Hammersmith, and 
might be allowed to see Potash and Perlmutter" 
Another letter, written on Christmas Day to 
Russell Loines of New York, perhaps his great- 
est friend among his kind American hosts, shows 
how deeply the sight of the refugees had moved 
him. "I started a long letter to you in August 
and September, in my scraps of time; a valuable 
letter, full of information about the war and the 
state of mind of pacifists and others. The Ger- 
mans have it now. It went in my luggage to 
Antwerp, and there was left. Whether it was 
burnt or captured, I can't be sure. But it was 



T A MEMOIR 155 

in a tin box, with — damn it ! — a lot of my manu- 
script. And it was fairly heavily shelled. 

"I don't know if you heard of my trip to Ant- 
werp. A queer picnic. They say we saved the 
Belgian army, and most of the valuable things 
in the town — stores and ammunition, I mean. 
With luck, we might have kept the line fifty miles 
forward of where it is. However, we at last got 
away — most of us. It really was a very mild 
experience; except the thirty miles march out 
through the night and the blazing city. Antwerp 
that night was like several different kinds of hell 
— the broken houses and dead horses lit up by 
an infernal glare. The refugees were the worst 
sight. The German policy of frightfulness had 
succeeded so well, that out of that city of half a 
million, when it was decided to surrender Ant- 
werp, not ten thousand would stay. They put 
their goods on carts, barrows, perambulators, 
anything. Often the carts had no horses, and 
they just stayed there in the street, waiting for a 
miracle. There were all the country refugees, 
too, from the villages, who had been coming 
through our lines all day and half the night. I'll 
never forget that white-faced, endless procession 
in the night, pressed aside to let the military — 
us — pass, crawling forward at some hundred 
yards an hour, quite hopeless, the old men cry- 



156 RUPERT BROOKE 

ing, and the women with hard drawn faces. What 
a crime! — and I gather they've announced their 
intention of keeping Belgium if they can. 

'"England is remarkable. I wish I had the 
time to describe it. But this job keeps one so 
darned tired, and so stupid, that I haven't the 
words. There are a few people who've been so 
anti-war before, or so suspicious of diplomacy, 
that they feel rather out of the national feeling. 
But it's astonishing to see how the 'intellectuals' 
have taken on new jobs. No, not astonishing; 
but impressive. Masefield drills hard in Hamp- 
stead, and told me, with some pride, a month ago, 
that he was a Corporal, and thought he was going 
to be promoted to Sergeant soon. Cornford is 
no longer the best Greek scholar in Cambridge. 
He recalled that he was a very good shot in his 
youth, and is now a Sergeant-Instructor of .Mus- 
ketry. I'm here. My brother is a 2nd Lieuten- 
ant in the Post Office Rifles. He was one of 
three great friends at King's. The second is In- 
telligence Officer in H.M.S. Vengeance, Chan* 
nel Patrol. The third is buried near Cambrai. 
Gilbert Murray and Walter Raleigh rise at six 
every day to line hedgerows in the dark, and 
'advance in rushes' across the Oxford meadows. 

"Among the other officers in this Division 



A MEMOIR 157 

whom I know are two young Asquiths ; * an Aus- 
tralian professional pianist 2 who twice won the 
Diamond Sculls; a New Zealander 3 who was 
fighting in Mexico and walked 300 miles to the 
coast to get a boat when he heard of the War ; a 
friend of mine, Denis Browne — Cambridge — 
who is one of the best young English musicians 
and an extremely brilliant critic; a youth lately 
through Eton and Balliol, 4 who is the most bril- 
liant man they've had in Oxford for ten years; 
a young and very charming American called 
John Bigelow Dodge, who turned up to 'fight for 
the right' — I could extend the list. It's all a ter- 
rible tragedy. And yet, in its details, it's great 
fun. And — apart from the tragedy — I've never 
felt happier or better in my life than in those days 
in Belgium. And now I've the feeling of anger 
at a seen wrong — Belgium — to make me happier 
and more resolved in my work. I know that 
whatever happens, I'll be doing some good, fight- 
ing to prevent that" 

"I hope to get through," he wrote about the 
same time to Mrs. Arnold Toynbee. "I'll have 
such a lot to say and do afterwards. Just now 

1 Brigadier-General Arthur Asquith, D.S.O., and his brother 
Herbert. 
2 F. S. Kelly, killed in action. 

8 Brigadier-General Bernard Freyberg, V.C., D.S.O. 
4 Patrick Shaw-Stewart, killed in action. 



158 RUPERT BROOKE 

I'm rather miserable, because most of my school- 
friends are wounded, or 'wounded and missing,' 
or dead. Perhaps our sons will live the better 
for it all. I knew of yours, I was very glad. It 
must be good to have a son. When they told us 
at Dunkirk that we were all going to be killed 
in Antwerp, if not on the way there, I didn't 
think much (as I'd expected) what a damned 
fool I was not to have written more, and done 
various things better, and been less selfish. I 
merely thought 'what Hell it is that I shan't have 
any children — any sons.' I thought it over and 
over, quite furious, for some hours. And we were 
barely even under fire, in the end!" 

"There's a lot to talk about," he told Jacques 
Raverat, "though I'm rather beyond talking. 
Yes, we are insular. Did you hear of the British 
private who had been through the fighting from 
Mons to Ypres, and was asked what he thought 
of all his experiences? He said, 'What I don't 

like about this 'ere b Europe is all these 

b pictures of Jesus Christ and His relations, 

behind b bits of glawss.' * It seems to me 

to express perfectly that insularity and cheerful 
atheism which are the chief characteristics of my 
race. 

1 This was a story of Julian GrenfelPs about one of his men, 
which I had passed on to Rupert. 



A MEMOIR 159 

"All the same, though myself cheerful, insu- 
lar, and an atheist, I'm largely dissatisfied with 
the English, just now. The good ones are all 
right. And it's curiously far away from us (if 
we haven't the Belgians in memory as I have). 
But there's a ghastly sort of apathy over half 
the country. And I really think large num- 
bers of male people don't want to die. Which 
is odd. I've been praying for a German 
raid 

"My mind's gone stupid with drill and arrang- 
ing about the men's food. It's all good fun. I'm 
rather happy. I've a restful feeling that all's 
going well and I'm not harming anyone, and 
probably even doing good. A queer new feeling. 
The only horror is that I want to marry in a 

hurry and get a child, before I vanish 

There's the question: to ponder in my sleeping- 
bag, between the thoughts on the attack and cal- 
culations about the boots of the platoon. In- 
soluble : and the weeks slip on. It'll end in my 
muddling that, as I've muddled everything else." 

After they got back from Antwerp, there was 
a tiresome period of re-shuffling among the dif- 
ferent battalions; but by the middle of Decem- 
ber, Rupert, Denis Browne, Arthur Asquith, 
Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Bernard Freyberg and 
the rest were reunited at Blandford Camp in the 



160 RUPERT BROOKE 

'Hood,' where there were other officers who were 
either friends already or belonged to contermin- 
ous sets; so that a pleasant family part was soon 
established. The life was strenuous, but not 
eventful. "I spend Christmas," x he wrote, "in 
looking after drunken stokers. One of them has 
been drunk since 7 a.m.; he neither eats nor 
drinks, but dances a complicated step up and 
down his hut, singing 'How happy I am, how 
happy I am— a short, fat, inelegant man, in 
stockinged feet. What wonders we are ! There's 
no news — occasional scares. On Wednesday I 
(don't tell a soul) started a sonnet. What a fall!" 
The five sonnets called '1914' had been coming 
for some time, and were finished at Rugby when 
he went there for a few days' leave just after 
Christmas. "These proofs have come," he wrote 
from Canford Manor on January 24th. "My 
muse, panting all autumn under halberd and 
cuirass, could but falter these syllables through 
her vizor. God, they're in the rough, these five 
camp-children— 4 and 5 are good though, and 
there ra*e phrases in the rest. 2 

J He had telegraphed just before, to a trusty friend, "Send 
mince-pies for sixty men and a few cakes immediately." 

3 "I think reading in war-time right enough," he wrote to Miss 
Pye from the Mediterranean. "But writing requires a longer 
period of serenity, a more certainly undisturbed subconsciousness. 
If the S.C.'s turbulent, one's draught from it is opaque. Witness 
the first three sonnets." 



A MEMOIR 161 

"Last night I slept between sheets, and this 
morning I lay an hour in a hot bath, and so was 
late for a breakfast of pheasant and sausages and 
the divinest coffee. Now I sit over a great fire 
of wood in the hall of a house built by Vanbrugh, 
with a Scuola di Bellini above me, smoking and 
reading and writing. 

"I've been peacefully reading up the country- 
side all the morning. Where our huts are was 
an Iberian fort against the Celts — and Celtish 
against Romans — and Roman against Saxons. 
. . . Just over the hills is that tower where a 
young Astronomer watched the stars, and a Lady 
watched the Astronomer. 1 By Tarrant Hinton, 
two miles North, George Bubb Dodington lived 
and reigned and had his salon. In Tarrant 
Crawford, two miles South, a Queen lies buried. 
Last week we attacked some of the New Army 
in Banbury Rings — an ancient fort where Arthur 
defeated the Saxons in — what year? Where I 
lay on my belly cursing the stokers for their 
slowness, Guinevere sat, and wondered if she'd 
see Arthur and Lancelot return from the fight, 
or both, or neither, and pictured how they'd look ; 
and then fell a- wondering which, if it came to the 
point, she'd prefer to see." 

"The world's going well," he wrote at this time 

1 See Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower. 



162 RUPERT BROOKE 

to Jacques Raverat: "better than it did when we 
were younger. And a Frenchman is the one per- 
son in the world with something to be proud of, 
these days." 

VII 

On January 29th he came to London to re- 
cover from a rather bad attack of influenza, stay- 
ing first at Gray's Inn and then at 10 Downing 
Street. I saw him for the last time on February 
25th, when the King reviewed the Naval Divi- 
sion at Blandford before their departure for the 
Dardanelles. The secret of where they were go- 
ing was just out, and everyone was wild with 
excitement and joy. "It's too wonderful for be- 
lief," he wrote to Miss Asquith. "I had not 
imagined Fate could be so benign. I almost sus- 
pect her. Perhaps we shall be held in reserve, 
out of sight, on a choppy sea, for two months. 
. . . Yet even that! . . . But I'm filled with 
confident and glorious hopes. I've been looking 
at the maps. Do you think perhaps the fort on 
the Asiatic corner will want quelling, and we'll 
land and come at it from behind, and they'll make 
a sortie and meet us on the plains of Troy? It 
seems to me strategically so possible. Shall we 
have a Hospital Base (and won't you manage 



A MEMOIR 163 

it?) on Lesbos? Will Hero's Tower crumble 
under the 15" guns? Will the sea be polyphlois- 
bic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I 
loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish De- 
light, and carpets? Should we be a Turning 
Point in History? Oh God! 

"I've never been quite so happy in my life, I 
think. Not quite so pervasively happy; like a 
stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly 
realise that the ambition of my life has been — 
since I was two — to go on a military expedition 
against Constantinople. And when I thought I 
was hungry or sleepy or aching to write a poem 
— that was what I really, blindly, wanted. This 
is nonsense. Good-night. I'm very tired with 
equipping my platoon." 

They sailed from Avonmouth in the Grantully 
Castle on February 28th. "Four days out," he 
dated his next letter to Miss Asquith. "All day 
we've been just out of sight of land, thirty or 
forty miles away — out of sight, but in smell. 
There was something earthy in the air, and warm 
— like the consciousness of a presence in the dark 
— the wind had something Andalusian in it. It 
wasn't that wall of scent and invisible blossom 
and essential spring that knocks you flat, quite 
suddenly, as you've come round some unseen cor- 
ner in the atmosphere, fifty miles out from a 



164 RUPERT BROOKE 

South Sea Island; but it was the good smell of 
land — and of Spain, too ! And Spain I've never 
seen, and never shall see, may be. All day I sat 
and strained my eyes to see over the horizon 
orange-groves and Moorish buildings, and dark- 
eyed beauties and guitars, and fountains, and a 
golden darkness. But the curve of the world lay 
between us. Do you know Jan [MasefieldJ's 
favourite story — told very melodiously with 
deep-voice reverence — about Columbus? Co- 
lumbus wrote a diary (which Jan reads) and de- 
scribed the coast of America as he found it — the 
divinest place in the world. 'It was only like 
the Paradise of the Saints of God' — and then he 
remembered that there was one place equal to it, 
the place where he was born — and goes on 'or 
like the gardens of Andalusia in the spring.' ' 

He wrote to me from 'North of Tunis' on 
March 7th. "It seems ages ago since we said 
good-bye to you on our mottled parade-ground. 
We've had rather a nice voyage; a bit unsteady 
the first day (when I was sick) and to-day; other- 
wise very smooth and delicious. There has been 
a little, not much, to do. I've read most of 
Turkey in Europe. But what with parades and 
the reading of military books, I've not written 
anything. Anyway, my mind's always a blank 
at sea. 



A MEMOIR 165 

"For two days we've been crawling along the 
African Coast, observing vast tawny mountains, 
with white villages on this side of them and white 
peaks beyond. The sea has been a jewel, and 
sunset and dawn divine blazes of colour. It's all 
too ridiculously peaceful for one to believe any- 
thing but that we're a — rather odd — lot of tour- 
ists, seeing the Mediterranean and bent on en- 
joyment. War seems infinitely remote; and 
even the reason, foreseeing Gallipoli, yet admits 
that there are many blue days to come, and the 
Cyclades 

"I can well see that life might be great fun; 
and I can well see death might be an admirable 
solution 

"In a fortnight, the quarter million Turks." 

I think these words on the prospect of living or 
dying represent his normal state of mind; and 
that he had nothing which could justly be called 
a presentiment of death. "This is very odd," was 
the beginning of a letter which he wrote for me in 
case he died. "But I suppose I must imagine 
my non-existence, and make a few arrange- 
ments." He certainly spoke to some people as 
though he were sure of not coming back ; but no 
one can read the letters I have printed without 
seeing what a creature of moods he was; and it 
was always his way to dramatise the future. 



166 RUPERT BROOKE 

There was a vivid realisation of the possibility 
— I believe that was all. 1 

He spoke in the letter I have just quoted of a 
wish he had expressed to his mother (which she 
has carried out) , that any money he left, and any 
profits from his books, should be divided between 
three of his brother poets. "If I can set them 
free to any extent," he told her, "to write the 
poetry and plays and books they want to, my 
death will bring more gain than loss." The three 
were Lascelles Abercrombie, Walter de la Mare, 
and Wilfrid Gibson. 2 

1 The preoccupation with the idea of death, shown in his poems 
from the first, has often been noticed. When I looked through 
his copy of Aristophanes, I was struck by a heavy triple mark 
which he had put against two lines of the Frogs — almost the only 
passage he had marked at all: 

T(Bvt]KOaiv yap eXeyev , G> /jloxOvP* ^> 
ofr oi>8e rpls Xeyovres k^LKVov/j,eda. 

"Aye, but he's speaking to the dead, you knave, 
Who cannot hear us though we call them thrice." 

(B. B. Rogers' translation.) 

This may have suggested the phrase about the 'unanswering dead' 
in Ambarvalia, which occurs again in a fragment, probably written 
in 1914:— 

"We have told you the last lies, unanswering Dead. 
Farewell, we have said, 
Knowing the Dead fare neither ill nor well." 

3 Mrs. Brooke included in this bequest the amount of the How- 
land Memorial Prize, the first award of which was unanimously 
made to her son in 1916, after his death, by the Committee of the 
Corporation of Yale University. The prize is given "in recognition 
of some achievement of marked distinction in the field of literature 
or fine arts or the science of government; and an important factor 
in the selection is the idealistic element in the recipient's work." 

Mr. Charles Howland wrote to Mrs. Brooke announcing the 



A MEMOIR 167 

"We had a very amusing evening in Malta," 
he wrote to his mother on March 12th. "Our 
boat got in one afternoon almost last of the lot. 
We were allowed ashore from 5 to midnight. 
Oc, 1 Denis and I drove around in a funny little 
carriage, and looked at the views. It's a very 
lovely place; very like Verona or any Italian 
town, but rather cleaner and more Southern. 
There was a lovely Mediterranean sunset and 
evening, and the sky and sea were filled with 
colours. The odd and pleasant thing was the 
way we kept running into people we knew and 
hadn't expected to meet. First there were peo- 
ple in all the other battalions, who had come on 
by other boats. Then we found 'Cardy' [Lionel] 
Montagu, E.S.M.'s brother, staring at the Cathe- 
dral. Then Cherry, who used to be in the Anson 
with us, a nice chap, and he dined with us; and 
in, at the end of dinner, came Patrick Shaw- 
Stewart (of this Battalion) with Charles Lister, 
who was dragged in absolutely at the last mo- 
award: "You must have known already by many avenues of the 
feeling about him in the United States — of the sense of tenderness 
for his youth, of the attitude of possession of him jointly with 
Englishmen as one of the Masters of Song in our common tongue; 
and indeed that he typifies the nobility of sacrifice for a cause that 
is ours as well as yours." 

The lecture, which by the terms of the gift was due from the 
prizewinner, was delivered at Yale by Walter de la Mare in his 
stead. 

1 Arthur Asquith. 



168 RUPERT BROOKE 

ment because he is supposed to know Turkish, 
and is with the Divisional Staff. Before dinner, 
as I was buying buttons in a little shop, in walked 
George Peel! And after dinner, at a nice little 
opera, everyone I knew seemed to appear, in 
khaki, all very cheerful and gay. Lots of peo- 
ple who we thought were going to be left behind 
had been able to get out at the last moment, and 
pounced on us from behind boxes or out of 
stalls. The Maltese elite who were there must 
have been puzzled at the noise." 

From Malta they went on to Lemnos; "the 
loveliest place in the evening sun," he wrote, 
"softly white, grey, silver- white buildings, some 
very old, some new, round a great harbour — all 
very Southern; like an Italian town in silver- 
point, livable and serene, with a sea and sky of 
opal and pearl and faint gold around. It was 
nearer than any place IVe ever seen to what a 
Greek must have witnessed when he sailed into 
a Greek coast-city." 

Here there was an alarum, but not an excur- 
sion, as appears from a letter to Miss Cox, dated 
"Somewhere (some way from the front) March 
19th." "The other day we — some of us — were 
told that we sailed next day to make a landing. 
A few thousand of us. Off we stole that night 
through the phosphorescent Aegean, scribbling 



A MEMOIR 169 

farewell letters, and snatching periods of excited 
dream-broken sleep. At four we rose, buckled 
on our panoply, hung ourselves with glasses, 
compasses, periscopes, revolvers, food, and the 
rest, and had a stealthy large breakfast. That 
was a mistake. It's ruinous to load up one's belly 
four or five hours before it expects it — it throws 
the machinery out of gear for a week. I felt ex- 
tremely ill the rest of that day. 

"We paraded in silence under paling stars 
along the sides of the ship. The darkness on the 
sea was full of scattered flashing lights, hinting 
at our fellow-transports and the rest. Slowly 
the sky became warm and green, and the sea 
opal. Everyone's face looked drawn and ghastly. 
If we landed, my company was to be the first 
to land. . . . We made out that we were only 
a mile or two from a dim shore. I was seized 
with an agony of remorse that I hadn't taught 
my platoon a thousand things more energetically 
and competently. The light grew. The shore 
looked to be crammed with Fate, and was omi- 
nously silent. One man thought he saw a camel 
through his glasses. . . . 

"There were some hours of silence. 

"About seven, someone said, 'We're going 
home.' We dismissed the stokers, who said, 
quietly, 'When's the next battle?', and disem- 






170 RUPERT BROOKE 



panoplied, and had another breakfast. If we 
were a 'feint,' or if it was too rough to land, or 
in general, what little part we blindly played, 
we never knew, and shall not. Still, we did our 
bit, not ignobly, I trust. We did not see the 
enemy. We did not fire at them ; nor they at us. 
It seemed improbable they saw us. One of B 
Company — she was rolling very slightly — was 
sick on parade. Otherwise, no casualties. A 
notable battle. 

"Later. We're off to Egypt : for repose. For 
— I imagine — a month at least. What a life! 
Another campaign over!" 

On March 27th they arrived at Port Said,^and 
he went for three days' leave with Arthur Asquith 
and Patrick Shaw-Stewart to Cairo, where they 
saw the Sphinx and the Pyramids, rode about on 
camels, and bought things in the bazaars. 

Sir Ian Hamilton came to Port Said to review 
the Naval Division on April 3rd, and offered him 
a post on his staff . "I saw Rupert Brooke," he 
wrote to me, "lying down under a shelter, rather 
off colour, poor boy. He had got a touch of the 
sun the previous day. It was nothing, and es- 
sentially he was looking in first-class physical 
condition. He very naturally would like to see 
this first adventure through with his own men; 



r A MEMOIR 171 

after that I think he would like to come to me. 
It was very natural, and I quite understand it — 
I should have answered the same in his case had 
I been offered a staff billet." Rupert never 
mentioned this offer to his brother-officers. "The 
first day I was sick," he wrote to his mother, 
"before I got out of camp — was the day when 
our new G.O.C. -in-Chief — you'll know who that 
is — reviewed us. I'd met him once or twice in 
London. He came to see me after the review 
and talked for a bit. He offered me a sort of 
galloper-aide-de-camp job on his staff: but I 
shan't take it. Anyhow, not now, not till this 
present job's over; afterwards, if I've had enough 
of the regimental officer's work, I might like it." 
"But it's really so jolly," he wrote to me on the 
same occasion, "being with Oc and Denis and 
Charles [Lister] and Patrick and Kelly, that it'd 
have to be very tempting company to persuade 
me to give it up." 

That evening he joined Patrick Shaw-Stewart, 
who had the same illness, at the Casino Hotel. 
"Then began nearly a week of comic alternations 
and vicissitudes in our humiliating complaint," 
Shaw-Stewart wrote to me. "The companion- 
ship in our two little beds was very close, but 
limited by our mental state, which owing to star- 
vation was — for me — complete vacuity. So we 



172 RUPERT BROOKE 

just lay opposite and grew our little beards, mine 
red, his golden brown, and made our little jokes 
at one another — very good ones, I can't help 
thinking. Altogether, if it hadn't been for the 
starvation and the uncomfortable beds and the 
terrible difficulty of making the Italian waiter 
understand (R. did better with gesticulatory 
English than I with Italian, which made me furi- 
ous) it was the best period of the war for me. 
We were turned out rather quickly. On the Fri- 
day morning, April 9th, we were ordered to be 
aboard that evening if we were well enough, 
which of course we both said we were. In my 
case there was no doubt I was: in R.'s I think it 
was doubtful, and Colonel Quilter rather urged 
him to stay behind if he still felt queer, but of 
course it would have been a difficult thing (mor- 
ally) to do. So we both went on board and stuck 
to our cabins for a day or two, R. emerging later 
than me. Just at this time he seemed really 
pretty well (as well as at Blandford, which I 
think for him probably wasn't so very well) but 
a little listless." 

Rupert himself wrote to Miss Asquith the day 
he left the hotel, "Anyhow here I am, well up on 
that difficult slope that leads from arrowroot, 
past chicken broth, by rice puddings, to eggs in 



A MEMOIR 173 

milk, and so to eggs, and boiled fish, and finally 
(they say) chicken and fruit and even real meat. 
But that is still beyond the next crest. On! on! 
But while I shall be well, I think, for our first 
thrust into the fray, I shall be able to give my 
Turk, at the utmost, a kitten's tap. A diet of 
arrowroot doesn't build up violence. I am as 
weak as a pacifist." 

About the same time he wrote to Lascelles 
Abercrombie: "The Sun-God (he, the Song- 
God) distinguished one of his most dangerous 
rivals since Marsyas among the oc thousand 
tanned and dirty men blown suddenly on these 
his special coasts a few days or weeks ago. He 
unslung his bow. ... I lie in an hotel, cool at 
length, with wet cloths on my head and less than 
nothing in my belly. Sunstroke is a bloody af- 
fair. It breaks very suddenly the fair harmonies 
of the body and the soul. I'm lying recovering 
from it, living faintly on arrowroot and rice-pud- 
dings and milk; passing from dream to dream, 
all faint and tasteless and pure as arrowroot it- 
self. I shall be all right in time for the fighting, 
I hope and believe. 

"Later (at sea) . I know now what a campaign 
is. I had a suspicion from Antwerp. It is con- 
tinual crossing from one place to another, and 






174 RUPERT BROOKE 

back, over dreamlike seas : anchoring, or halting, 
in the oddest places, for no one knows or quite 
cares how long : drifting on, at last, to some other 
equally unexpected, equally out of the way, 
equally odd spot: for all the world like a bottle 
in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort. 
Somewhere, sometimes, there is fighting. Not 
for us. In the end, no doubt, our apparently 
aimless course will drift us through, or anchor 
us in, a blaze of war, quite suddenly ; and as sud- 
denly swirl us out again. Meanwhile, the laziest 
loitering lotus-day I idled away as a wanderer in 
the South Seas was a bustle of decision and pur- 
pose compared to a campaign. 

"One just hasn't, though, the time and detach- 
ment to write, I find. But I've been collecting 
a few words, detaching lines from the ambient 
air, collaring one or two of the golden phrases 
that a certain wind blows from (will the Censor 
let me say?) Olympus, across these purple seas." 



VIII 

Of the 'golden phrases,' only the merest frag- 
ments remain. He must have made up more in 
his head than he wrote down, for his last letter 



A MEMOIR 175 

to me implies a good deal more than there is. 
"The first few days afloat I was still convalescent. 
So I could lie in my bunk and read and write in 
a delicious solitude all day. I actually did jot 
down a line or two. Nothing yet complete (ex- 
cept a song, worthless alone, for Denis to put 
lovely notes around) ; but a sonnet or two almost 
done; and the very respectable and shapely 
skeleton of an ode-threnody. All of which shall 

travel to you if and when they are done 

I must go and censor my platoon's letters. My 
long poem is to be about the existence — and non- 
locality — of England. And it contains the line 
— 'In Avons of the heart her rivers run.' Lovely, 
isn't it?" 

There is only a small black note-book, from 
which I will put together what I can. There will 
be found in the appendix the little song called 
The Dance, mentioned in the letter; and a frag- 
ment which is almost his only attempt at blank 
verse — though even here rhyme steals in towards 
the end. Here are the scraps which seem to be- 
long to the 'ode-threnody' on England: 

All things are written in the mind. 
There the sure hills have station; and the wind 
Blows in that placeless air. 

And there the white and golden birds go flying; 
And the stars wheel and shine; and woods are fair; 



176 RUPERT BROOKE 

The light upon the snow is there; 

and in that nowhere move 
The trees and hills 1 and waters that we love. 

And she for whom we die, she the undying 
Mother of men 

England ! 

* * * 

In Avons of the heart her rivers run. 

* * * 

She is with all we have loved and found and known, 

Closed in the little nowhere of the brain. 

Only, of all our dreams, 

Not the poor heap of dust and stone, 

This local earth, set in terrestrial streams, 

Not this man, giving all for gold, 

Nor that who has found evil good, nor these 

Blind millions, bought and sold . . . 

* * * 

She is not here, or now — 

She is here, and now, yet nowhere — 

We gave her birth, who bore us — 

Our wandering feet have sought, but never found her- 

She is built a long way off — 

She, though all men be traitors, not betrayed — 

Whose soil is love, and her stars justice, she — 

Gracious with flowers, 

And robed and glorious in the sea. 2 



1 The word 'hands' is written here, I think, by mistake for 
'hills.' Compare 'the trees and waters and the hills' in his early 
poem, The Charm. 

2 This last set of lines, or rather jottings, is not written as if 
they were meant to be consecutive. 



A MEMOIR 177 

She was in his eyes, but he could not see her. 
And he was England, but he knew her not. 

There are fragments of other poems ; two about 
the expedition: 

They say Achilles in the darkness stirred, 

And Hector, his old enemy, 

Moved the great shades that were his limbs. They 

heard 
More than Olympian thunder on the sea. 
* * * 

Death and Sleep 
Bear many a young Sarpedon home. 

And this, headed 'Queen Elizabeth': 

And Priam and his fifty sons 
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns, 
And shake for Troy again. 

Then there is this: — 

'When Nobby tried,' the stokers say, 

'To stop a shrapnel with his belly, 
He away, 

He left a lump of bleeding jelly/ 
But he went out, did Nobby Clark 1 
Upon the illimitable dark, 
Out of the fields where soldiers stray, 

Beyond parades, beyond reveille. 

*A11 sailors whose name is Clark are nick-named Nobby. No 
one knows why. 






178 RUPERT BROOKE 

This is for one of the sonnets: 

The poor scrap of a song that some man tried 

Down in the troop-decks forrard, brought again 

The day you sang it first, on a hill-side, 

With April in the wind and in the brain. 

And the woods were gold; and youth was in our hands. 

* * * 

Oh lovers parted, 
Oh all you lonely over all the world, 
You that look out at morning empty-hearted, 
Or you, all night turning uncomforted 

* * * 

Would God, would God, you could be comforted. 

* * * 
Eyes that weep, 

And a long time for love; and, after, sleep. 

There are lines of a poem about evening, in 
which he recurs to the hares in the Grantchester 
cornfields : 

And daylight, like a dust, sinks through the air, 
And drifting, golds the ground . . . 

A lark, 
A voice in heaven, in fading deeps of light, 
Drops, at length, home. 

* * * 

A wind of night, shy as the young hare 
That steals even now out of the corn to play, 
Stirs the pale river once, and creeps away. 



A MEMOIR 179 

And of an elegy: 

The feet that ran with mine have found their goal, 
The eyes that met my eyes have looked on night. 
The firm limbs are no more; gone back to earth, 
Easily mingling . . . 

What he is yet, 
Not living, lives, hath place in a few minds . . . 

He wears 
The ungathered blossom of quiet; stiller he 
Than a deep well at noon, or lovers met; 
Than sleep, or the heart after wrath. He is 
The silence following great words of peace. 

That is all. 

On the 17th of April they landed at Scyros. 
Arthur Asquith described it to his sister before 
anything had happened: "This island is more 
mountainous than Lemnos, and more sparsely in- 
habited. It is like one great rock-garden of 
white and pinkish-white marble, with small red 
poppies and every sort of wildflower; in the 
gorges ilex, dwarf holly, and occasional groups of 
olives; and everywhere the smell of thyme (or is 
it sage? or wild mint?). Our men kill adders 
and have fun with big tortoises. The water near 
the shore, where the bottom is white marble, is 
more beautifully green and blue than I have ever 
seen it anywhere." 



180 RUPERT BROOKE 

Here then, in the island where Theseus was 
buried, and whence the young Achilles and the 
young Pyrrhus were called to Troy, Rupert 
Brooke died and was buried on Friday, the 23rd 
of April, the day of Shakespeare and of St. 
George. 

He seemed quite well till Tuesday the 20th, 
when there was a Divisional Field-day, and he 
went to bed tired immediately after dinner. On 
Wednesday he stayed in bed with pains in his 
back and head ; and a swelling on his lip ; but no 
anxiety was felt till the evening, when he had a 
temperature of 103. Next morning he was much 
worse; the swelling had increased, and a consul- 
tation was held. The diagnosis was acute blood- 
poisoning, and all hope was given up. It was 
decided to move him to the French hospital-ship 
Duguay-Trouin which happened to be at Scyros. 
When he was told this, his one anxiety was lest 
he should have difficulty in rejoining his bat- 
talion. They reassured him, and he seemed to 
be content. Soon afterwards he became coma- 
tose; and there does not seem to have been any 
moment when he can have realised that he was 
dying. The rest of the story shall be told in the 
words of the letter which Denis Browne wrote 
me on the 25th from the transport. 

"In less than half an hour we had carried him 



A MEMOIR 181 

down into a pinnace and taken him straight 
aboard the Duguay-Trouin. They put him in 
the best cabin, on the sun-deck. Everything was 
very roomy and comfortable; they had every 
modern appliance and the surgeons did all that 
they possibly could. 1 Oc and I left him about 6 
when we could do nothing more, and went to the 
Franconia, where we sent a wireless message to 
the Admiralty. 2 Next morning Oc and I went 
over to see what we could do, and found him much 
weaker. There was nothing to be done, as he 
was quite unconscious and they were busy trying 
all the devices they could think of to give him 
ease. Not that he was suffering, for he was 
barely conscious all Thursday (he just said 
'Hallo' when I went to lift him out into the pin- 
nace) , and on Friday he was not conscious at all 
up to the very last, and felt no pain whatever. 
At 2 the head surgeon told me he was sinking. 
Oc went off to see about arrangements, and I 
sat with Rupert. At 4 o'clock he became weaker, 

1U I do want you to feel," Browne wrote to Mrs. Brooke, "that 
nothing was left undone that could alleviate his condition or pro- 
long his life. Nothing, however, all the doctors, French and Eng- 
lish, assured me, could have helped him to fight his disease, except 
a strong constitution. And his was so enfeebled by illness as to 
make the contest an unequal one. They gave us hardly any hope 
from the first." 

2 The telegrams were received as if from Lemnos, and as there 
was no reason to suppose otherwise it was assumed, and published, 
that he had died there. 



182 RUPERT BROOKE 

and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all 
round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing 
through the door and the shaded windows. No 
one could have wished a quieter or a calmer end 
than in that lovely bay, shielded by the moun- 
tains and fragrant with sage and thyme. 1 

"We buried him the same evening in an olive- 
grove where he had sat with us on Tuesday — one 
of the loveliest places on this earth, with grey- 
green olives round him, one weeping above his 
head; the ground covered with flowering sage, 
bluish-grey, and smelling more delicious than any 
flower I know. The path up to it from the sea 
is narrow and difficult and very stony ; it runs by 
the bed of a dried-up torrent. We had to post 
men with lamps every twenty yards to guide the 
bearers. He was carried up from the boat by his 
A Company petty officers, led by his platoon- 
sergeant Saunders; and it was with enormous 
difficulty that they got the coffin up the narrow 
way. The journey of a mile took two hours. It 
was not till 11 that I saw them coming (I had 
gone up to choose the place, and with Freyberg 
and Charles Lister I turned the sods of his grave ; 
we had some of his platoon to dig) . First came 
one of his men carrying a great white wooden 

1 This sentence is from the letter to Mrs. Brooke. 



A MEMOIR 183 

cross with his name painted on it in black; then 
the firing-party, commanded by Patrick; and 
then the coffin, followed by our officers, and Gen- 
eral Paris and one or two others of the Brigade. 
Think of it all under a clouded moon, with the 
three mountains * around and behind us, and 
those divine scents everywhere. We lined his 
grave with all the flowers we could find, and 
Quilter set a wreath of olive on the coffin. The 
funeral service was very simply said by the Chap- 
lain, and after the Last Post the little lamp-lit 
procession went once again down the narrow path 
to the sea. 

"Freyberg, Oc, I, Charles and Cleg [Kelly] 
stayed behind and covered the grave with great 
pieces of white marble which were lying every- 
where about. Of the cross at the head you know ; 
it was the large one that headed the procession. 
On the back of it our Greek interpreter wrote in 
pencil: 

kv96.de Kelrai 
6 8ov\os tov Qeov 
avdvTro\ox^yos TOV 
'Ayy\iicov volvtlkov 
(nrodav&v virep rrjs 
bireKevdepwaecos rrjs 
Kcoy" TovXews aird 

TCOV ToVpKcbv. 1 

1 Their names are Paphko, Komaro, and Khokilas. 

1 Here lies the servant of God, Sub-Lieutenant in the English 
Navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the 
Turks. 



184 RUPERT BROOKE 

At his feet was a small wooden cross sent by his 
platoon. We could not see the grave again, as 
we sailed from Scyros next morning at 6." 

The same friend wrote to Mrs. Brooke: "No 
words of mine can tell you the sorrow of those 
whom he has left behind him here. No one of us 
knew him without loving him, whether they knew 
him for ten years, as I did, or for a couple of 
months as others. His brother officers and his 
men mourn him very deeply. But those who 
knew him chiefly as a poet of the rarest gifts, 
the brightest genius, know that the loss is not only 
yours and ours, but the world's. And beyond 
his genius there was that infinitely lovable soul, 
that stainless heart whose earthly death can only 
be the beginning of a true immortality. 

"To his friends Rupert stood for something so 
much purer, greater, and nobler than ordinary 
men that his loss seems more explicable than 
theirs. He has gone to where he came from ; but 
if anyone left the world richer by passing through 
it, it was he." 

Next morning the Grantully Castle sailed for 
the Gallipoli Peninsula. Within six weeks, of 
the officers named in Denis Browne's letter, he 
and Colonel Quilter were dead, and ail but one 
of the others had been wounded. Kelly, Lister, 
and Shaw- Stewart have since been killed. 



A MEMOIR 185 

Winston Churchill wrote in the Times of April 
26th: "Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from 
the Admiral at Lemnos tells us that this life has 
closed at the moment when it seemed to have 
reached its springtime. A voice had become au- 
dible, a note had been struck, more true, more 
thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility 
of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, 
than any other — more able to express their 
thoughts of self-surrender, and with a power to 
carry comfort to those who watched them so in- 
tently from afar. The voice has been swiftly 
stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain ; 
but they will linger. 

"During the last few months of his life, months 
of preparation in gallant comradeship and open 
air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force 
of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and 
the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and 
valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was will- 
ing to die for the dear England whose beauty 
and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards 
the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute con- 
viction of the rightness of his country's cause, 
and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men. 

"The thoughts to which he gave expression in 
the very few incomparable war sonnets which he 
has left behind will be shared by many thou- 



186 RUPERT BROOKE 

sands of young men moving resolutely and 
blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruel- 
lest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that 
men have fought. They are a whole history and 
revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, 
fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic 
symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one 
would wish England's noblest sons to be in days 
when no sacrifice but the most precious is ac- 
ceptable, and the most precious is that which is 
most freely proffered." 

• ••••• 

"Coming from Alexandria yesterday," Denis 
Browne wrote to me on June 2nd, two days be- 
fore his own death, "we passed Rupert's island 
at sunset. The sea and sky in the East were 
grey and misty; but it stood out in the West, 
black and immense, with a crimson glowing halo 
round it. Every colour had come into the sea 
and sky to do him honour; and it seemed that 
the island must ever be shining with his glory 
that we buried there." 



APPENDIX 



Note 

The Appendix contains: (1) the only two co- 
herent fragments found in the notebook which 
he used in the last month of his life (see Memoir, 
page 175) ; a little song, written, I think, on his 
travels; and a poem, dating probably from 1912, 
which for some reason he left unrevised, but 
which I print for the sake of the characteristic 
image in the first stanza: (2) a few 'lighter' 
poems which I dare say he would have printed 
on their merits if he had published a volume in 
which they would not have been out of key. Two 
of these, the "Letter to a Live Poet" and "The 
Little Dog's Day," were written for Westmin- 
ster Gazette competitions, in which they won 
prizes. 

KM. 



FRAGMENT 

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night 
Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped 
In at the windows, watched my friends at table, 
Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway, 
Or coming out into the darkness. Still 
No one could see me. 

I would have thought of them 
— Heedless, within a week of battle — in pity, 
Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness 
And link'd beauty of bodies, and pity that 
This gay machine of splendour 'Id soon be broken, 
Thought little of, pashed, scattered. . . . 

Only, always, 
I could but see them — against the lamplight — pass 
Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass, 
Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave's faint light, 
That broke to phosphorus out in the night, 
Perishing things and strange ghosts — soon to die 
To other ghosts — this one, or that, or I. 

April, 1915. 



189 



190 RUPERT BROOKE 
THE DANCE 

A Song 

As the Wind, and as the Wind, 

In a corner of the way, 
Goes stepping, stands twirling, 
Invisibly, comes whirling, 
Bows before, and skips behind, 
In a grave, an endless play — 

So my Heart, and so my Heart, 

Following where your feet have gone, 
Stirs dust of old dreams there; 
He turns a toe; he gleams there, 
Treading you a dance apart. 
But you see not. You pass on. 



April, 1915. 



SONG 



The way of love was thus. 
He was born one winter morn 
With hands delicious, 
And it was well with us. 

Love came our quiet way, 
Lit pride in us, and died in us, 
All in a winter's day. 
There is no more to say. 



1913 (?). 



APPENDIX 191 



SOMETIMES EVEN NOW 



• • • 



Sometimes even now I may 

Steal a prisoner's holiday, 

Slip, when all is worst, the bands, 

Hurry back, and duck beneath 
Time's old tyrannous groping hands, 

Speed away with laughing breath 
Back to all I'll never know, 
Back to you, a year ago. 

Truant there from Time and Pain, 
What I had, I find again: 
Sunlight in the boughs above, 

Sunlight in your hair and dress, 
The Hands too proud for all but Love, 

The Lips of utter kindliness, 
The Heart of bravery swift and clean 

Where the best was safe, I knew, 
And laughter in the gold and green, 

And song, and friends, and ever you 
With smiling and familiar eyes, 

You — but friendly: you — but true. 

And Innocence accounted wise, 
And Faith the fool, the pitiable. 

Love so rare, one would swear 
All of earth for ever well — 

Careless lips and flying hair, 
And little things I may not tell. 

It does but double the heart-ache 
When I wake, when I wake. 

1912 (?). 



192 RUPERT BROOKE 



SONNET: IN TIME OF REVOLT 

The Thing must End. I am no boy! I am 
No boy! ! being twenty-one. Uncle, you make 
A great mistake, a very great mistake, 

In chiding me for letting slip a 'Damn!' 

What's more, you called me 'Mother's one ewe lamb,' 
Bade me 'refrain from swearirg — for her sake — 
Till I'm grown up' . . . — By God! I think you take 

Too much upon you, Uncle William! 

You say I am your brother's only son. 

I know it. And, 'What of it?' I reply. 

My heart's resolved. Something must be done. 

So shall I curb, so baffle, so suppress 

This too avuncular officiousness, 

Intolerable consanguinity. 

January, 1908. 



A LETTER TO A LIVE POET 

Sir, since the last Elizabethan died, 

Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse, 

Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious 

Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine, 

Has, on the world's most noblest chord of song, 

Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate 

With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day, 



APPENDIX 193 

Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice 

And serene utterance of old. We heard 

— With rapturous breath half-held, as a dreamer dreams 

Who dares not know it dreaming, lest he wake — 

The odorous, amorous style of poetry, 

The melancholy knocking of those lines, 

The long, low soughing of pentameters, 

— Or the sharp of rhyme as a bird's cry — 

And the innumerable truant polysyllables 

Multitudinously twittering like a bee. 

Fulfilled our hearts were with that music then, 

And all the evenings sighed it to the dawn, 

And all the lovers heard it from all the trees. 

All of the accents upon all the norms! 

— And ah! the stress on the penultimate! 

We never knew blank verse could have such feet. 

Where is it now? Oh, more than ever, now, 

I sometimes think no poetry is read 

Save where some sepultured Caesura bled, 

Royally incarnadining all the line. 

Is the imperial iamb laid to rest, 

And the young trochee, having done enough? 

Ah ! turn again ! Sing so to us, who are sick 
Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions, 
Decked in the simple verses of the day, 
Infinite meaning in a little gloom, 
Irregular thoughts in stanzas regular, 
Modern despair in antique metres, myths 
Incomprehensible at evening, 
And symbols that mean nothing in the dawn. 



194 RUPERT BROOKE 

The slow lines swell. The new style sighs. The Celt 
Moans round with many voices. 

God! to see 
Gaunt anapaests stand up out of the verse, 
Combative accents, stress where no stress should be, 
Spondee on spondee, iamb on choriamb, 
The thrill of all the tribrachs in the world, 
And all the vowels rising to the E ! 
To hear the blessed mutter of those verbs, 
Conjunctions passionate toward each other's arms, 
And epithets like amaranthine lovers 
Stretching luxuriously to the stars, 
All prouder pronouns than the dawn, and all 
The thunder of the trumpets of the noun! 

January , 1911. 



FRAGMENT ON PAINTERS 

There is an evil which that Race attaints 

Who represent God's World with oily paints, 

Who mock the Universe, so rare and sweet, 

With spots of colour on a canvas sheet, 

Defile the Lovely and insult the Good 

By scrawling upon little bits of wood. 

They'd snare the moon, and catch the immortal sun 

With madder brown and pale vermilion, 

Entrap an English evening's magic hush . . . 



APPENDIX 195 



THE TRUE BEATITUDE 

They say, when the Great Prompter's hand shall ring 
Down the last curtain upon earth and sea, 
All the Good Mimes will have eternity 

To praise their Author, worship love and sing; 

Or to the walls of Heaven wandering 

Look down on those damned for a fretful d , 

Mock them (all theologians agree 

On this reward for virtue), laugh, and fling 

New sulphur on the sin-incarnadined . . . 

Ah, Love ! still temporal, and still atmospheric, 
Teleologically unperturbed, 
We share a peace by no divine divined, 

An earthly garden hidden from any cleric, 
Untrodden of God, by no Eternal curbed. 

1913. 



SONNET REVERSED 

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights 
Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights. 

Ah, the delirious weeks of honeymoon! 

Soon they returned, and, after strange adventures, 
Settled at Balham by the end of June. 

Their money was in Can. Pacs. B. Debentures, 



196 RUPERT BROOKE 

And in Antofagastas. Still he went 

Cityward daily; still she did abide 
At home. And both were really quite content 

With work and social pleasures. Then they died. 
They left three children (besides George, who drank) 

The eldest Jane, who married Mr. Bell, 
William, the head-clerk in the County Bank, 

And Henry, a stock-broker, doing well. 

Lulworth, 1, January, 191 1. 



THE LITTLE DOG'S DAY 

All in the town were still asleep, 

When the sun came up with a shout and leap. 

In the lonely streets unseen by man, 

A little dog danced. And the day began. 

All his life he'd been good, as far as he could, 
And the poor little beast had done all that he should. 
But this morning he swore, by Odin and Thor 
And the Canine Valhalla — he'd stand it no more! 

So his prayer he got granted — to do just what he wanted, 

Prevented by none, for the space of one day. 

'Jam incipiebo, 1 sedere facebo* 2 

In dog-Latin he quoth, 'Euge! sophos! hurray!' 

*Now we're off. 

*I'll make them sit up. 



APPENDIX 197 

He fought with the he-dogs, and winked at the she-dogs, 
A thing that had never been heard of before. 
'For the stigma of gluttony, I care not a button !' he 
Cried, and ate all he could swallow — and more. 

He took sinewy lumps from the shins of old frumps, 
And mangled the errand-boys — when he could get 'em. 
He shammed furious rabies, 1 and bit all the babies, 1 
And followed the cats up the trees, and then ate 'em! 

They thought 'twas the devil was holding a revel, 
And sent for the parson to drive him away; 
For the town never knew such a hullabaloo 
As that little dog raised — till the end of that day. 

When the blood-red sun had gone burning down, 
And the lights were lit in the little town, 
Outside, in the gloom of the twilight grey, 
The little dog died when he'd had his day. 

July, 1907. 
1 Pronounce either to suit rhyme. 



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